Rnordman

If you’re traveling outside of the US, it’s nice to be able to use your smartphone.

It’s not only great to keep in touch, and could be essential if you have to work while you’re away from home, but it’s also useful for navigating an unfamiliar place, getting local information, making plans, and, of course, sharing photos.

But using your US-based phone outside of the country can get very expensive very quickly.

For example, I’m an AT&T subscriber, and international plans that allow me to use my phone in 150 countries start at $30 a month, on top of what I'm already paying each month.

That may not sound like much money, but the plans don’t give you much: a small fraction of the data you likely use each month, and a rate for phone calls that ranges from between $0.35 and $1.00 per minute. And if you don't sign up for a plan before you use your phone in another country it could cost as much as $2.50 a minute and a whopping $19.97 per megabyte.

For example, here are some of AT&T’s international plans. Check out how much it costs just to get a 800 megabytes of data:

Verizon has similarly priced international packages that you can buy before you leave the US, or pay-as-you-go plans that cost as much as $2.99 per minute, $0.50 per text message, and $2.05 per megabyte.

Here are Verizon’s Preferred Pricing plans:

If you’re a Sprint or T-Mobile subscriber, you may be able to use your phone at no extra cost when you travel abroad in many countries. Both carriers actually offer free data and texting outside of the US, and voice calls for $0.20 per minute. But the data speeds are 2G — really slow if you’re used to 3G or 4G LTE — which may not be fast enough for you, depending on what you're doing with your phone. And the coverage isn’t worldwide. Be sure to check where Sprint and T-Mobile offer free international roaming before your trip, and if your plan qualifies.

Still, Sprint and T-Mobile will charge you a lot if you want to use 4G or 3G data overseas, just like Verizon and AT&T do.

The best option

But the least expensive and easiest way that I’ve found to use your phone abroad is to buy a local SIM card, which gives you a local phone number in whatever country you’re visiting.

A SIM card is the little card that goes inside your phone and allows it to connect to a network. In many countries, you can find them in convenience stores, airports, and, of course, local carriers’ shops.

I recently went on vacation to Italy and Slovenia, and in both countries I bought prepaid plans that included SIM cards. It was not only easy to do this, but it was also cheap.

And I mean ridiculously cheap.

In Italy, two gigabytes of 3G data and 100 minutes of international talk time, which I could use to call the US, was under €20, or about $21.83. In Slovenia, one gigabyte of data was about €9 (about $9.83), and I was charged a low rate per minute, though I don’t remember what it was, to make phone calls.

This much data would have cost me hundreds of dollars if I had purchased my plan through AT&T or Verizon.

I bought the SIM cards at carrier shops — WIND in Italy, and Si.mobil in Slovenia — and the people working at the stores set up the phone for me. It only took a few minutes to choose a pre-paid plan, buy the SIM card, pop the SIM card in (be sure to save your old one for when you get back to the US!) and register the phone.

In Italy, we were required to show our IDs, which the store clerk photocopied. 

Buying a local SIM is also a great way to get some good local information that you may not find in a guidebook. The clerk at the WIND store gave us an incredible dinner recommendation — his favorite seafood place — and also told us where he goes to get the best gelato in Venice. 

It took a few hours for my phone to register to the network — a bit longer in Slovenia than it did in Italy — but soon after I visited the stores, I was able to use my phone like I use it in the US. It was very useful to help navigate the narrow and twisting alleyways of Venice.

I spent a week in each country, and I wasn’t planning on using my phone much — I was on vacation, so I didn’t need to work — so all the data I bought was more than enough. 

I also knew that there would be wifi networks at most of the places I stayed.

As my colleague Antonio Villas-Boas reported recently, streaming music for an hour — at typical quality — can use around 40 megabytes, and browsing a social networking app can use about twice that. Watching video from YouTube or Netflix, however, could eat up hundreds of megabytes an hour.

The networks in each country gave us speeds at 3G, which was fast enough for everything we wanted to do, like check email, use the GPS, and use apps like Business Insider, the New York Times, Facebook, Instagram, FaceTime, and more.

There are some important things consider if you'd like to buy a SIM card in another country and use it in a phone you bought in the US.

This only works if you have an “unlocked” phone. A locked phone is designed to work on one carrier's network, so in order to be able to use it on another network, it has to be unlocked. The good news is that thanks to a law passed last year, which made unlocking phones legal, new phones are increasingly coming unlocked.

All 4G LTE phones from Verizon, as well as most phones from the carrier, for example, come unlocked, and AT&T customers can request online instructions to unlock their phones.

But it's a good idea to check with your mobile provider to see if your phone is unlocked and if it will work on a network outside of the US, especially if the phone is a couple of years old. 

For more on unlocking phones in the US, check out this great explainer from Kate Fox at The Consumerist. 

Also, because phone numbers are associated with SIM cards, you’ll lose your phone number as soon as you pop out your SIM and put a new one in. That means that people in the US won’t be able to reach you while you’re gone if they call or text your US phone number.

Be sure to hold on to your existing SIM card and keep it in a safe place. The clerk at the Si.Mobil store in Slovenia suggested using a small piece of tape to secure it to the card that your new SIM card comes on, which worked well.

Not having my US phone number didn't matter to me, and probably won't be a big deal to you. You can, of course, just give your new number to people who you think will want to reach you while you're gone. But it's much easier to use what are called "over the top" apps to call and text. These apps, like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple's iMessage, and Skype, use a wifi or cellular network instead of minutes, so you don't need to worry about using up any minutes you paid for. 

So don't worry about signing up for an expensive travel plan from your US carrier next time you go abroad. Just make sure your phone is unlocked, and buy a local SIM card when you arrive.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This robot wakes you up in the morning and checks if you turned off the oven when you leave the house

© Brian Jackson / Dollar Photo Club

What if I tell you that there is a way to turn your $1 into $44.25?

It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it?

While some may think that there’s no way in high heaven to make this miracle happen; many of the seasoned internet marketers are achieving this miraculous multiplication of their money’s worth, month upon month upon month.

How do they manage that, you might ask?

According to the data uncovered by Emailexpert.org, “For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25.”

That’s a whopping 4400% return of your money’s value!

It’s for this same reason that marketers and business owners are gung ho about capturing their web visitors’ emails. They know, without a doubt, that the money is in fact on the list!

Because email marketing is such a powerful tool for growing your business, we need to make sure that we’re using the best email marketing software there is.

However, if you Google “best email marketing software 2015”, you’ll find differing expert opinions as to which is email software is the best.

Instead of giving you the top 10 list, we picked 2 of the most popular email marketing software in the industry. We then compared both tools side-by-side.

At the end of this article, you will have a better appreciation of the strengths of each software helping you decide which is the perfect fit for your business.
Of course, I will share my very own verdict at the end of the article as to which email marketing software is better than the other.

We introduce here GetResponse (http://www.getresponse.com/)…

… and AWeber (http://www.aweber.com/).

Both websites are professionally designed and built, and both allow you to create your own account.

GetResponse prides itself as the “World’s Easiest Email Marketing”, while AWeber declares “We’ll Help Grow Your Business in 30 Days.”

Here are 7 questions/elements that we will use to peg each software to determine which . Let’s see which one – GetResponse or AWeber – comes on top at the end of this article.

1. Which is more affordable?

Everyone is attracted to anything that has the word “free.” Free trials allow us to evaluate software before making any serious investments.

GetResponse allows 30 days of free use, without the need of credit card.

Signing up is very quick and simple.

AWeber also allows a 30-day free trial use, however…

…they require you to enter your credit card information.

Here’s the pricing scheme of GetResponse (https://secure.getresponse.com/pricing/en).

…and here’s the pricing of AWeber.

GetResponse is without a doubt more affordable than AWeber. Plus, GetResponse is hassle-free when using its 30-day free trial (no need of credit card).

2. Which platform is more intuitive?

GetResponse has a user-friendly interface that allows you to perform (right away) the 3 essential functions: Add Contacts, Create Web Form, and Create Newsletter.

Importing contacts.

Creating a web form.

Creating a newsletter.

Now, let’s take a look at the user interface of AWeber.

When you log in for the very first time, you are greeted with this screen.

Creating a list.

Setting up a message.

Once everything’s set up and you log-back in, you’ll have the following main user dashboard.

Managing subscribers.

The form designs.

Creating a newsletter can be quite confusing with AWeber. The button to create a newsletter isn’t readily available for the users.

Here’s a tutorial to help you with creating newsletters. http://www.aweber.com/send-email-newsletters.htm

Click “Messages”, then “Follow Up Series”.

Next, hover your cursor at the button “Create A Follow Up”, then click “Drag & Drop Email Builder”.

At this point, you can now design your newsletter using a variety of templates.

I feel that for those that are new to the platform, AWeber’s user interface isn’t as friendly as it should be.

On the other hand, GetResponse’s advantage is its clear layout of the most essential functions. So, GetResponse wins over AWeber in the “easy to use” department.

3. Platform has more tools/services that you can integrate.

Aweber has 124 apps GR only has about 106

According to GetResponse’s App Center (http://connect.getresponse.com/category/crm), they have about 106 total apps/services that they can integrate with their platform.

AWeber, on the other hand, has about 124 apps/services according to an entry in their Knowledge Base.

(https://help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/204031276-What-Services-Can-I-Integrate-With-AWeber-).

In this round, AWeber without a doubt the winner.

4. Which one allows you to do Contact Segmentation?

GetResponse allows you to create contact or list segments based on certain criteria. It even provides a PDF tutorial, found here.

AWeber also supports segmentation, as shown in its Knowledge Base topic “How Do I Create A Segment?”

(https://help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/204028706-How-Do-I-Create-A-Segment-).

In this case, GetResponse and AWeber are even.

5. Which one can provide analytics and reports?

GetResponse can create Analytics Reports for your newsletter, RSS, Subscription, and Email Clients.

You can also generate reports for your Survey Statistics.

AWeber lets you add reports to your dashboard. This is explained in the Knowledge Base topic “How Do I Add a Report to My Dashboard?” (https://help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/204029816-How-Do-I-Add-a-Report-to-My-Dashboard-).

This is how the reports section in the AWeber’s Dashboard looks like.

Analytics reports let you see the progress of your campaigns. This time, GetResponse and AWeber are on equal footing in generating analytics reports.

6. Which allows you to create autoresponders easily?

In GetResponse, you can easily create and manage Autoresponders by going to the Messages menu.

In the case of AWeber, the option of setting up an autoresponder isn’t readily available in their dashboard. A couple of searches in its Knowledge Base won’t give you direct answers either.

This time, GetResponse wins over AWeber in the area of Autoresponders.

7. Which one provides better customer support?

GetResponse provides a 24/7 customer support via a virtual live chat.

Plus, GetResponse has a wealth of informative articles in its Learning Center (http://support.getresponse.com/)

In contrast, AWeber also has a virtual live customer support but it’s only available on certain times.

AWeber does have a Knowledge Base to answer most questions.

So, which one provides better customer support? In terms of who provides uninterrupted 24/7 coverage, GetResponse prevails over AWeber.

Summary and verdict

Here’s how the summary of our comparison turned out.

Which is more affordable?

– GetResponse

Which platform is more intuitive?

– GetResponse

Platform has more tools/services that you can integrate.

– AWeber

Which one allows you to do Contact Segmentation?

– GetResponse and AWeber

Which one can provide analytics and reports?

– GetResponse and AWeber

Which allows you to create autoresponders easily?

– GetResponse

Which one provides better customer support?

– GetResponse

Considering how my comparison turned out, my verdict is in favor of GetResponse.

What’s next?

If you find the information I shared to be helpful, please don’t forget to spread the word by sharing the post. Cheers!

I see you over there. Plotting your Next Big Thing. Crafting a launch strategy. Gearing up to have a rate increase chat with your favourite client.

Excellent – You’re on the right path to business success and excitement! There’s just one question that remains.

What are you going to charge?

Set your prices too low and you’re working your buns off and barely scraping by. Set them too high and you’ll spend more time convincing yourself you’re worth it, than delivering A+ service to your clients.

It’s a fine balance. And figuring out what your prices are going to be – whether they’re your launch prices or new-and-improved price increases – can be a challenge. But it’s not impossible.

Here are my go-to strategies for setting a price that pays.

Market Research

Taking the pulse of what others in your industry are charging is a great way to determine your own prices, especially if you’re just starting out. Don’t forget – you can expand your research outside of your industry. Look for similarities in duration, client benefit and format of delivery, rather than matching content.

Example: You’re cooking up a 6-part ecourse on web design that’ll be a combo of email, video and FB group participation. Looking around the market, you’ve noticed that a lot of other courses are being priced between $75 and $200. (There’s your range) You know that people who follow your course will be able to convert more clients, and improve their earnings…and that you’re pouring a ton of work into creating the modules. $75 is too low…but $150 feels good. You’re in line with the market, but still respecting your effort and the value you’re delivering.

Cost Plus

Building up your price from the bottom up is a solid way to make sure that not only are your costs covered, but you turn a satisfactory profit. The key? Having a crystal clear view on all of the time and effort you’re putting into creating the product or service, so that nothing slips through the cracks.

Example: Everyone loves the knitted scarves you send at the holidays – so you’re going pro! You’ll sell on Etsy, and you know that each scarf takes one ball of wool ($10) and takes you two hours to knit (2 x $12). You’d love to earn at least a 20% profit. So cost ($34) plus profit ($6.80) gives you a minimum selling price of $40.80. Want to go higher and list at $45? Go for it! Just don’t let that price slip below your Cost Plus calculation.

Rewind

To figure out where to start, it’s helpful to know where you’re going. Set an income goal for what you want to earn (gross) and then backtrack to figure out what price point will help you get there.

Example: Stars in your eyes, but feet firmly planted on the ground, you’re targeting a $40,000 year working with your coaching clients. You’d love to work with as many as possible, but time is tight, so you can only book 5 client hours a week. $40,000 a year = $3333 per month = $770 per week. With 5 client hours, each one of those has got to bring in at least $154. Want to bump that up to $175 over the next 6 months? Great! But now you know the minimum.

Ballpark

No no no, I’m not suggesting that you go out and set prices based on the same formulas as the beer and dogs at the ballpark. ($15 for a pint of beer? Really? Highway robbery if you ask me.) This is more about following your gut for what price feels right for your business.

Example: Here comes the launch of your signature program! Eeeeeee! You’ve never done anything like this before, it’s unlike anything you’ve seen, and if you tried to put a price tag on it based on the hours of work you’ve poured into it…well…that’d be a whole lot of digits in that figure. So how does $3000 sound? $2000? What number jumped out right away as one that you get excited about, but was also comfy? That’s where you start. From there, as your signature program gains momentum, the sky’s the limit.

Pricing Pro Tip 1

Avoid the ‘what would you pay for this?’ question in your research. Why? Because non-clients can give skewed answers. I would love to pay $500 for something, because that’s a nice number for my budget. But that doesn’t mean the service or expertise I’m receiving is worth that.  Set your own prices, and then set out to educate potential clients on why you’re going to knock their socks off with great results.

Pricing Pro Tip 2

You don’t have to snag a high price tag all at once. Step it up. Make yourself a plan and then stick to it. Want to be bringing in that (apparently…) coveted six figure income within 3 years? Work backwards from there to see what you need to be charging now, and for the next 3 years in order to achieve that goal. Those incremental price changes will add up.

Here are five reasons some people fail at cold calling.

1. Cold calling doesn’t work when you aren’t making enough calls. If you make between 6 and 10 calls a day, you aren’t really prospecting. That isn’t enough calls to give yourself a fair chance at success. To make cold calling work you need an already researched target list and 60 to 80 fasterdials. That number will not only produce appointments, but it will also give you enough reps to get better faster.
2. Your value prop is weak. If your cold calls aren’t producing results, one of the primary reasons for the failure to obtain appointments is that your sales call value proposition isn’t compelling. How would you like someone to “stop by,” to introduce myself and my services?” The great benefit your dream client can expect is a chance to listen to you talk about yourself and your company? You can see why they might pass. To make cold calling work, you have to ask for a meeting where your dream client receives the value.
3. Asking for big commitments early on causes resistance. If your “ask” is open-ended when it comes to time, you frighten your dream client off. They believe you may wear out your welcome by sitting in front of them for 90 or 120 minutes. Even asking for an hour can be too much. A smaller commitment, like 20 or 30 minutes instead of an open-ended request, is more palatable. And your dream client can say “yes,” confident that they can bail out if you aren’t creating value.
4. Cold calling won’t call if you don’t ask for a meeting twice. You should expect a “no” to your request for a meeting on your first attempt. Your dream client says “no” to everyone who calls, not knowing how to tell who is worth meeting and who isn’t. The first attempt elicits an objection, a test to see if you might be worth meeting. You must ask twice.
5. You can’t succeed at cold calling without resolving your prospect’s fears or concerns. You will hear “We are already working with someone.” You’ll hear, “We are happy with the people we work with now.” You will also hear “Just mail me information,” and “I don’t have time right now.” None of these objections to a meeting is likely true. In fact, some of your competitors are meeting with people who gave them these objections. Your prospect’s real concern is that you aren’t going to make a meeting worth their while, that you don’t have any real insight, that you can’t really help them, and that they are going to regret meeting with you. You have to promise that none of these things are true.

Are you making enough calls?

Do you have a compelling value proposition for the meeting you are asking for?

Is the commitment small enough that it is easy to say yes to?

Are you always asking twice?

Do you know how to resolve your prospects real concerns?

The post 5 Reasons You Fail at Cold Calling appeared first on The Sales Blog.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

While in Canada e-mail has been neutered by our supposed business friendly Prime Minister, in other parts of the free world, e-mail continues to be an effective way to initiate engagement with new potential buyers.  And while some may be shaking their head in disbelief, done right it contributes to prospecting success, but as usual, its down to what and how – the execution.

First thing is defining success. Many believe that success is the prospect calling you back and asking “where do I buy?” But remember “Prospects are Created – not Found”, e-mail plays a role in that creation. In an environment where it could take 8, 9, 10 or more attempts to get a response from a potential buyer, a good e-mail can be a good touch point, and lead to an initial contact, then engagement, purchase, relationship, kids, divorce, and all over again.

But let us approach as we would going for the Holy Grail, a cold e-mail that leads to engagement. What are the three crucial elements?

1. Subject Line
2. Body of Message
3. The Close

Do all these well and you have a shot, miss the mark on one, and you’re beat.

In light of the fact that most e-mail these days will be viewed on a hand held, we’ll present things from that standpoint, the good news is that if you do the mobile e-mail right, it also translates to success for those reading it on a desktop or tablet.
1. Subject Line – if the party you are writing does not know you, the Subject Line becomes the first pint of triage. It will determine whether they open it, save it for later reading (ya, later, OK), or just delete it at the speed of light. As a result you have two choices, you can mix them up, see if you see a pattern based on role, industry or other factors.

First method, not mine but based on a study of some 30 million e-mails, suggests that having nothing in the Subject Line. Nothing or ‘RE:’ followed by nothing. In some ways it makes sense, human curiosity, drives people to bring down the thumb find out.

But my preferred method takes this further and drives the two elements that follow. I like to use the final call to action, The Close, element 3, as the Subject Line. So if at the end of your e-mail you propose a call Friday at 2:30 pm, then use that as the Subject Line, but add a question mark at the end.

Subject: Call Friday at 2:30?

The natural instinct is to see if you had in fact forgot a call, or scheduled one in error, or if your admin had put something in that you missed. The effect is the same “Did I miss something, let me check this out, let’s take a look.” Leading is to element 2.

2. Body of Massage – the body needs to have two must things, first brevity, second no fat.

I can’t emphasise the importance of being brief. Two lines at most. I want you to be guided by the “Two Flicks of the Thumb Rule.” The first flick is to scroll down once; the second is either Reply or Delete. Which is why we have no room for fat.

The best way to achieve that is to include and highlight only those things that speak to the prospect. Nothing about you, nothing about your company, just how you can help them deliver against their objectives. This is harder that it sounds, because as sales people are geared to talk about their value prop, and other irrelevant things.

Based on your research, previous experience, and those things you learn from 360 Degree Deal View,  Identify a specific impact or outcome you can deliver based on your assessment of their objectives, and speak to that.

“I am writing to schedule a call to share with you how we helped Close Competitor Inc., add an additional service call for each of their trucks on a daily basis, leading to an 8% increase in revenue, 11% increase in margins, and a 12% improvement on return on assets…“

Which brings us to the third element, The Close.

3. The Close – is your call to action, the ask from the call, and as we know from the Subject Line, it is a call Friday at 2:30 pm. So continuing from element 2:

“…leading to an 8% increased in revenue, 11% increase in margins, and a 12% improvement on return on assets. I will call you for an introductory call Friday at 2:30.

Thank you,
Alfred E. Neuman”

The important thing to remember is that this e-mail may be one of a number of touch points, and it is important that it is planned in context of a complete pursuit plan. If this e-mail is the first contact, what will follow, if you had phoned prior, how does this e-mail fit in? The specific version above is geared as a first e-mail, if you had called and sent a previous e-mail, you will need to vary it.

But for first mails, with a realistic expectation that there will need to be more touch points in the process of creating a prospect, this is a good start.

Tibor Shanto    

Math, statistics, empirical analysis, and data visualization are all incredibly powerful tools for understanding the world.

Unfortunately, these tools are misused and abused in many ways that, to greater or lesser degrees, lead to confusion rather than clarification and make the world just a slightly worse place.

Here are 10 such things that aggravate me.

1. Misleading vertical axes

There are a few ways in which graphs can have badly misleading y-axes. Column or bar charts are a great way to compare values, since the lengths of the columns or bars should be proportional to the values being displayed.

But things can go horribly wrong if the base of the vertical axis is not set at zero. A classic example was a chart shown on Fox News last year comparing Obamacare enrollment numbers just before the enrollment deadline to the administration's goal:

As Media Matters pointed out in its post on the chart, the actual enrollment figure of 6 million was about 85% of the goal of a little over 7 million, while the column representing the current enrollment was about a third the height of the column representing the goal.

This is a deeply misleading way to represent these figures. Fortunately, Fox News later presented a corrected and more responsible version of the chart:

The "start at zero" rule applies mostly to column and bar charts. For line charts, it's fine to use whatever axis boundaries you need to show the trend in which you're most interested. This chart from FRED shows the decline in the labor-force participation rate, or the percentage of adults either employed or looking for work, since 2007. It has an axis ranging only from 62.5% to 66.5%:

That roughly 3% drop in labor-force participation, however, represents millions of Americans who have stopped working or looking for work, and it is one of the biggest mysteries of our current economic situation. The downward trend is the main story here, and so it's fine to choose axis bounds that clearly tell that story.

2. Multiple vertical axis scales

Another unfortunately common abuse of axes is putting multiple scales on a graph. This is usually done to show some kind of relationship or correlation between two time series. But because one can basically choose any scale one wants for the two axes, it's very easy to insinuate relationships that may not actually exist or matter.

Further, even if there is a valid relationship between the two series, the dual y-axis design can still be visually confusing, making it difficult to see the nuances of that relationship. Scatter plots are usually a better option for showing the relationship between two sets of values.

One of the most egregious examples of a misleading multiple scale graph is this chart combining the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the run-up to the 1929 stock market crash with more recent stock market movements:

The implication is that the vague similarities between the two time periods means that a 1929-like stock crash is imminent. This, of course, makes no sense, because this apparent pattern emerges only with a very selective choice of vertical axis scales and because two lines looking somewhat alike tell us nothing about the similarities and differences between the underlying market and economic situations — the things that actually matter when trying to figure out the likelihood of a crash — during the two time periods.

3. Horizontal axis disasters

Things can go wrong with the horizontal axis as well. One of the biggest problems is a missing horizontal axis on a time series chart. Showing how a quantity changes over time is a lot less useful if the actual time period being analyzed is unclear:

Having an x-axis for a time series graph still doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear, though. Business Insider deputy editor Sam Ro tweeted out this intriguing chart from a Bank of America research note, ostensibly showing technological development and population growth over time:

The time scale is uneven and appears to have no actual relationship with the data being presented. Apparently Greece and Rome peaked in about A.D. 1000, and the industrial revolution, moon landing, and invention of railroads all occurred in the past 15 years.

When big events happen, Twitter will frequently visualize activity on the social network related to those events. Unfortunately, its charts usually lack both an x-axis and a y-axis, making it rather difficult to get any insight:

4. The lottery

Taking a break from aggravating things in charts, I am not a huge fan of playing the lottery. Buying a lottery ticket is almost always a losing proposition. Even in the case of immensely large jackpots, the probability of winning is so low that the expected value of a lottery ticket will almost certainly be negative.

Of course, this is a matter of personal taste. I'd rather not waste a dollar, but other people can certainly enjoy buying a ticket for non-monetary reasons like fear of missing out on a jackpot, or the simple rush of taking the gamble.

5. The concept of wind chill

Wind chill combines temperature and wind speed into a single index value, represented as an adjusted temperature. The goal is to capture the interaction between wind and cold — wind blowing over exposed skin will pull heat away more quickly than still air of the same temperature.

This measure, however, is flawed. First, several other factors affect a person's perception of weather: Is it raining? Is it sunny, or overcast? What time of day is it? Wind chill, while bringing together two important parts of weather, ignores others.

Second, representing the combination of temperature and wind as another temperature is odd. A 35 degree Fahrenheit (1.7 degrees Celsius) day with 25 mph (40 kph) winds doesn't really "feel like" a 23° F (-5° C) day. Most immediately, a glass of water left outside on a windy 35° F day will never freeze, as the actual temperature is still above the freezing point, while a glass left outside on a still 23° F day will eventually freeze. Temperature is temperature, and wind speed is wind speed.

That said, wind speed (and other factors) are still very important! In conditions of extreme cold, exposed skin will suffer from frostbite faster in windy situations than in still situations, all other things being equal. I just find the representation of a combined temperature and wind speed as a new "temperature" somewhat odd.

6. Pie charts

Pie charts are intended to show how some whole is broken into component parts. In most cases, they fail at that goal. When we're breaking a big circle into many pieces, it can be hard to directly compare the sizes of those pieces and thus the proportions of interest.

Here's a chart breaking down the popularity of various pizza toppings. Note that each pie wedge needs to be labeled with its percentage, because otherwise it would be hard to tell, say, whether sausage or mushrooms are more popular, given the similar size of the two wedges:

Bar or column charts tend to do a better job of representing these kinds of breakdowns for a large number of subcategories.

On the flip side, pie charts can be somewhat clearer when looking at just a small number of categories with large differences between the percentages:

Of course, given that the relevant information from this pie chart is directly printed as text, and we're basically just looking at a single number — the proportion of climate scientists who reject human-caused global warming — one might wonder why we'd bother with the chart at all.

7. Bad map-coloring schemes

Maps can be an incredibly useful way to display geographically varying information. However, they must be designed carefully to clearly convey their data.

One somewhat frequent problem in creating maps is using arbitrarily chosen colors to display data. This map, from Imgur via @BeautifulMaps on Twitter, uses a very unintuitive color scheme to show speed limits around the world:

There isn't a natural flow in the color scheme to go along with the naturally increasing scale of speed limits. I have no idea, at a glance, whether Texas' blue speed limit is higher or lower than neighboring Mexico's light green speed limit. I have to refer to the key every time I look at a different country to have any idea what that country's color means.

A better option is to stick with one color, but vary the saturation, brightness, or intensity of that color. This map from the Census Bureau showing the minority proportion of each state's population in 2000 has a scale from light blue to dark blue, making regional patterns immediately apparent:

We can clearly see, even without looking at the key, that minorities tend to be a larger percentage of the population in the South and in more urban states, while the less densely populated states of the Midwest and Great Plains tend to have smaller proportions.

Two colors, varying by intensity, can be helpful in situations in which there is a natural midpoint. Comparing Democratic votes with Republican votes in an election, seeing where incomes are above the national average or below the national average, or seeing where populations increased and declined in a given year are all cases in which a two-color scheme can work well.

As an example of the last case, here is a map we made using Census data showing which US counties had population growth or loss between 2013 and 2014. Growing counties are in blue, with darker shades indicating faster growth; shrinking counties are in red, with darker shades indicating faster loss:

8. Questionable psychological measures

The human mind is an incredibly complex thing, and we know very little about how it works. This does not stop us from making often clumsy attempts to measure and compare people based on intelligence or personality.

One of the worst offenders is the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, which attempts to assign a personality "type" to test-takers. The test sorts people into 16 categories, based on four binary personality trait variables: introverted versus extroverted, intuitive versus sensing, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving.

The test has numerous problems. First off is the dichotomous nature of the four trait scales: A person who takes the test and scores just slightly more extroverted than introverted is placed solidly in the "extrovert" bucket, despite having a mixture of traits.

Related to this problem is the reliability of the test: It's not uncommon for people who take the test and then retake it a few weeks later to end up assigned to a completely different personality type. Because the test is supposed to be measuring something fundamental about a person's psyche, that variability is problematic.

The MBTI also has somewhat questionable origins. It was developed by a mother-daughter team in the 1940s, neither of whom had any formal psychological training. The test also has come under strong criticism from social scientists for its lack of empirical validity or theoretical justification in the decades since its development.

9. General bad chart design

In addition to the sins of axes, pie charts, and map colors mentioned above, charts and infographics can fail at their task of conveying data in plenty of other ways. In his seminal 1983 book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte coined the word "chartjunk" to describe unnecessary and distracting elements of a graph that either add nothing to the reader's understanding of the information being presented or even actively detract from that understanding.

Chartjunk can take on many forms. Some common forms include poorly chosen shading, background, or border options that draw the eye away from the information being presented, excessively distracting decorative elements, and the use of poorly scaled 3D and related design effects that distort the reader's perception of the data.

Tufte includes the chart to the left of the age breakdown of college students in his book, writing, "This may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print."

The chart essentially displays only five numbers: the proportions of college students 25 and older over a five-year period. To do this, the chart has four brightly colored regions, two of which are there just to provide an off-center 3D perspective effect that is both distracting and makes the graph harder to read. Like the misleading y-axis of the initial Fox News Obamacare chart above, the blue region draws the reader's eye up, confusingly suggesting that the earlier years' proportions are higher than they actually are.

Further, the top half of the chart, showing the proportions of college students under the age of 25, is redundant: This is just the mirror image of the lower half of the chart, because the percentage of students under age 25 is just 100% minus the percentage of students over age 25.

The chart and charts like it that have poor chartjunk-laden design decisions take very simple data sets and present them in an almost incomprehensibly overcomplicated and ugly way. Former Business Insider reporter Walt Hickey found several examples of extremely poor chart design and compiled them here.

10. The number 10, and other big round numbers

On December 23, 2014, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 18,000 for the first time in the index's history, and the headline on that morning's Business Insider market update post reflected this "milestone."

Several of my friends will be turning 30 this year, which seems somewhat more momentous and important than my coming 29th birthday.

Privately held tech startups that raise money at a valuation of at least $1 billion are labeled "unicorns," while presumably an app developer worth only $990 million on paper would just be a run-of-the-mill horse.

There are 10 items on this list, not nine or 11, either of which would easily have been possible by removing an item or finding more things that annoy me.

In each of these cases, and in several other everyday situations, multiples of powers of 10 are favored over other numbers as important cutoffs or milestones. But this is an essentially arbitrary thing: The big round numbers we view as important are seen as such only because the most common number system in the modern world is the base 10 decimal system.

The most likely reason we use decimal rather than a different number system is because human beings generally tend to have 10 fingers. This itself is an arbitrary side effect of human evolution.

This arbitrary nature of big round numbers, and of related decimal-biased numerical events, is a thing that annoys me.

Sigh.

SEE ALSO: Everything about the way we teach math is wrong

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do

Getting along with your manager, and learning to work with him or her effectively, is key to your career success — and pretty necessary for your day-to-day sanity.

Luckily, determining how to communicate with your boss is as easy as determining his or her management style. Once you know that, you'll have the tools you need to deliver the results she wants, in the way she wants.

Here are seven of the most popular types of managers you'll encounter in the workplace — along with the best ways to work alongside them, according to experts. Heed their advice and you'll soon be the boss' favorite — no sucking up necessary.

The Amiable Manager

How to work with them: This boss seeks to connect on a personal level and likes to spend time getting to know employees, says Corrie Shanahan, CEO of The Beara Group, a consulting practice specializing in leadership and communication. "If this is not your own preference, find an area where you can share and connect — like a love of sports or dining out — and use that as the topic you discuss with your boss, before getting down to business," she suggests.

The Follow Through Manager

How to work with them: According to small business expert Lisa Baker-King, who has more than 20 years of experience coaching small business owners, this management style values having a clear, established road map. (Some common phrases you might hear from this boss: What process did you follow? or Where is the project plan?) "When working with this style, be sure that you can show your boss what steps you took," Baker-King advises. "If you want to deviate from the process, and you might have a good reason to do so, let her know your logic and explain what is remaining the same."

The Directive Manager

How to work with them: This type of boss cares about the bottom line — and moving quickly. "Get the point as soon as possible and keep your emails super short and clear," Shanahan says. "Nothing drives this boss crazier than lots of superfluous background and detail. She doesn't need it."

The Analytic Manager

How to work with them: All about numbers and evidence, this boss will not respond well to a hunch or a vague idea. Do some research, however little, and get some statistics to back up your suggestions — even if it's something minor or non-work-related, like having healthier options in the vending machines, Shanahan advises.

The Quick Start Manager

How to work with them: "This boss may say something like, 'I have a bunch of new ideas' or 'Give me the high level version,'" Baker-King says. Since he or she will be itching to get started, your job is to figure out the solution or implementation and present that first, before giving any details on how and why, she advises.

The Implementer

How to work with them: This management style is very hands-on. "This boss wants to see the work more than you telling them about the work," Baker-King says. "She can be recognized by saying things like, 'Show me how you did that,' or 'Walk me through it.'" Baker-King adds that when working with this boss, remember that she values high quality work — no shortcuts!

The Expressive Manager

How to work with them: This boss is all about concepts, possibilities, and ideas. This style is full of enthusiasm, so do not bog your boss down with too many "yes, buts…," Shanahan says, because that will drive her nuts. Instead, share in her enthusiasm and suggest you come back with some ways of taking things forward. "When you want to nix something, make it part of a larger trend or idea and persuade her in your enthusiasm for a different course of action," she advises.

SEE ALSO: 15 qualities that will impress your boss

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 little-known Excel shortcuts that will impress your boss

Today’s video is the second in our series on how to differentiate your business – specially tailored for service businesses.

Today we’re looking at how to become seen as an Authority or Go To Expert in your field. And frankly, I think most people who teach this topic get it completely wrong. They focus on the “plumbing” rather than the fundamentals.

So in this week’s video I teach you 4 methods that will properly position you as an authority in your field.

Video Transcript

Hi, it’s Ian here. Welcome to another 5 minute marketing tip. We are talking again today about how to differentiate your business, and in this video in particular, how to become seen as an authority in your field, an expert, a go-to expert, or leading expert in your field. I think that most people who teach you how to do this have got things the wrong way round. I’ll explain why after the break. See you there.

Hi, it’s Ian here. Welcome back. Being seen as an authority in your field, or a go-to expert, has become a very popular topic these days, pretty much everyone says it’s one of the must-do things you want to do if you want to have a very successful business. I don’t think it’s necessary for most business. It’s a very valuable position, but I don’t think it’s necessary for most business. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible. Of course, logically, we can’t all be one of the top experts in our field. It just doesn’t work like that. In particular, clients don’t need the top expert in the field all the time. For most clients, most of the sort of work they need doing needs a good job doing at a decent price by someone they know, like, and trust, and that’s about it.

Having said that, of course, if you are seen as one of the leading experts in your field, then you’re more likely to be working on the most interesting work, get paid the best rates for it, and to be constantly in demand. It is a great position to have, but not everyone can have it, partly because there’s only a limited number of people who can be there, and partly because you genuinely do need to be a leading expert in your field to get there. Now to be seen as a leading expert, you need 2 things. You need to have that expertise, as I’ve said, and you need people to see that expertise. They need to know that you are an expert. Now, that latter thing is often about writing a book, doing videos, being on TV, radio, doing blog posts, articles, webinars, et cetera, et cetera.

Those are all important, and that’s what most people focus on when they try and teach you how to become known as an expert in your field. That’s what 99% of the teaching is about, how to take your expertise and then get it out there so people see it. For me, that side of things is just the plumbing. It’s a bit like if you’re talking about the vintage wine business. The vintage wine business, you’ve got to grow the wine, and then you’ve got to get it to the shops. You’ve got to market it so people know about it, then you’ve got to sell it, and you’ve got to bottle it, et cetera.

Now, the bottling, the distribution, the marketing, is all necessary. Without that, your vintage wine wouldn’t sell, but it doesn’t make vintage wine. You need really great wine in the first place. It’s all about the grapes, the soil conditions, how you grow them, how you ferment them in the oak casks, or whatever it is you do. You can tell I’m not really a great winemaker. The point is that, although the plumbing is important, of getting stuff to the customer and marketing it, you need to start out with a great vintage. That’s what you should focus on. If you really want to be seen as an expert in your field, that plumbing stuff is all doable. There’s lots of different ways of learning how to do that. What’s tricky is building that expertise in the first place. Before you start sharing stuff, have something really valuable to share.

Now I’m going to share with you 4 ways of coming up with something valuable to share, your expertise of building your authority. The first of those is to leverage your own experience. All of us have our own story to tell of how we got to where we are, and very often that story establishes us as knowing about a certain field. To take an extreme example, if you had the chance of employing Richard Branson to help you learn and to teach about entrepreneurship, you’d jump at that chance because his own experience has proven that he’s a brilliant entrepreneur and knows how to do it. Even on a smaller scale, we’ve all got examples of that.

In my case, for example, as you probably know, I started off as a consultant, and I eventually moved into marketing and business development in consulting. I went from being absolutely hopeless at it, and completely not a natural, to being reasonably good at it. Now I was never the super star, wonderful sales person, but actually that’s all right for me, because when I was teaching people about face to face marketing and business development, most people really just wanted to get to quite good, because they were starting off where I’d started off, at that uncomfortable and not very good position. They didn’t see the super star sales person position as being at all feasible for them.

You don’t have to have changed the world and run a Fortune 500 company for your experience to be valuable. It just takes you to think about who would my experience be valuable to, and then offer that experience as your expertise, your authority to those people.

The second way you can establish your authority is through a big idea, or big ideas. Now this is how a lot of well-known people do it. If you think about the field of business strategy for example, Michael Porter is a classic example. Now, the mechanics folks, the plumbing folks would tell you, “How did Michael Porter become seen as the leading expert on business strategy? Well, he wrote some best-selling books.” That was how he did it, through publishing.

Of course, hundreds, if not thousands of people have written books. It wasn’t the fact that Porter wrote books that established him as the leader in strategy, it was the ideas contained in those books that really established him. The value chain model, the 5 forces model, et cetera, et cetera, really caught people’s imagination, really helped them to develop business strategy, and therefore positioned him as the real expert. Now obviously coming up with a big idea yourself isn’t easy, otherwise we’d all be doing it, but just a couple of quick tips for, I guess, coming up with small ideas that could grow into big ideas.

The first thing is to take your experience, take the things that have worked well for you, the things you have done with clients that have been very successful, and try and simplify them. Bring them down to the 1, 2, 3 key factors that have really worked to drive that. When I started off doing Pain Free Marketing, that was all based on the 2 or 3 things, value and advanced nurturing relationships, that had really worked for me, and I turned that into Pain Free Marketing. You can break it down step by step, so that Porter’s value chain model is really just taking the end to end process from a supplier to a manufacturer, to a distributor, to a retailer, and breaking down those steps and analyzing the costs, and the value added, and things at each of those different steps.

If you break down your model … I guess my client flow model is another example where I’ve broken down and simplified the steps in marketing and business development for professional service firms into 4 big steps, and then just looked at those. You could group things together. That’s Porter’s 5 forces model. He just grouped together the different areas of competition, that drove competition in a particular industry, into those 5 main forces. It’s fairly simple when you look at it afterwards. All he did really was brainstorm, validate, and thought about it, brought in some economics, but it worked. It gave people new ideas and helped them think differently about their industry.

Can you group together different things that you’ve worked on into categories and draw a model around them that’s really going to help people understand things better? You look at stuff like that. You can also build on existing models. A great example of that is Richard Koch. Richard, you may know, wrote the 80/20 Principle book. Huge, multi-million best seller, established himself as a real leader and expert, but of course it was based on the work of Alfredo [Perito 00:07:22] back in the 16th century or something like that. You can take old ideas and renew them, or you can put more depth, more flesh onto existing ideas. You can build on other people’s ideas, and take them that step further. The big idea can work really well.

Something related that works really well is research. Great example of that is someone like Jim Collins who wrote Built to Last and Good to Great. Now, Collins based those books, and his position of expertise and authority, on a whole bunch of research he did into what makes great companies, or what’s the difference between a good company and a great company. He did, in his word, he did very thorough, very deep research. Some people have doubted how deep it really was, but that really established his position, because he had that research and he had that evidence for what he was saying and why he was recommending things that other people didn’t have.

Again, you can do that yourself on a small scale by doing surveys, by interviewing people in your target sector. I did it, for example, when I started up, by interviewing … I became known as a real expert at business development for law firms despite the fact that I had no background in there. I interviewed 20 senior partners in law firms locally, asked them about business development and best practices, then all of a sudden I knew more about business development best practice in law firms than pretty much anyone else, because no one else had gone to the effort of doing that in-depth research. If you do the in-depth research in your sector, your industry, you can get that expert position as well.

Finally, the fourth technique is what I like to call technology transfer. A bit related to what we talked about with the 80/20 principle, where Koch took something that was kind of old and transferred it into the modern age. With technology transfer, what you’re often doing is taking something that’s working in another industry or sector and getting it to work in your particular industry or area of expertise or [specialism 00:09:13]. It’s quite tied up with what we talked about last week in terms of specializing. You look in another industry, find out what’s working there. You see if it’ll work in your industry, you apply it. You’re one of the first to make it work in your sector because some sectors are ahead of others, for example. Some types of customer or client are quicker to adopt new practices in any given field than others.

Transfer it to yours, see if it works, and then share that experience. Great example of that is a guy called Mark Dawson here in the UK. Mark’s a fiction author who spotted that lots of other sectors, like the marketing sector, et cetera, were using Facebook advertising. Decided he would try to use it to sell his fiction books. It worked really well for him, so if he then went on to create a course for authors on Facebook advertising, and became known as the authority in Facebook advertising for authors. Now nothing in Mark’s course was particularly new or revolutionary. It’s stuff that people have been doing in other sectors for a couple of years, but it was new and revolutionary for authors because they’d never done it before.

Again, you can do the same in your sector. You can look at other industries or other sectors that are a bit more leading edge, pick up some practices from there that look interesting. You’ve got to try them out in your own sector and make sure they work. You can’t just say they work. That technology transfer into your sector or from other fields entirely, from sports, from politics, or from history, like Richard Koch did, that can all work to bring in new things into your sector so that you can become known as the authority based on that transfer in.

Those are 4 big methods that you can use to establish your authority based on genuine expertise and genuine differences in thinking. Rather than just rehashing the same old same old and sharing it, create something new using those 4 methods, and then share that. That’s what’ll really establish you as authority in your field. See you next week.

The post Building Authority to Differentiate Your Business appeared first on How To Get Clients: Proven Strategies to Win More Clients.

Monday, July 28th, 2015: Google announces the end of Google+.

Except, not really.

In a blog titled “Everything in its right place,” Google announced their plans for the future of Google+. Google has a wealth of changes in store for the platform, many of which they say will provide better long-term value—for those who use Google+ every day and for those who don’t.

The Changes to Google+

As far as social media sites went, Google+ was always kind of a black sheep. But believe it or not, people did and still do use Google+. Millions of them, in fact. To serve their established user base (and inevitably net new ones), Google will be moving forward by tightening up their product—not killing it off completely.

Here’s a breakdown of the upcoming changes:

Google+ is moving toward a more “focused experience.” People are using Google+ to have conversations with others who share their interests. Google will be moving some features that “aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience” while adding new features such as Google+ Collections that help users organize and enjoy posts better.

No more “mandatory” Google+ account creation. Didn’t it bother you the first time you wanted to comment on a YouTube video, but you didn’t want it posted on your Google+ profile? (Like, say you’re into Viking death metal but also really, really like that new Taylor Swift single that just dropped, which could be bad for your public image.) Well, Google heard and listened—they are separating Google+ from YouTube.

In fact, you’ll no longer see that Google+ sign up page when you use any other Google sites. Your Google account and your Google+ page will be separate. Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing, shared this little nugget on the matter on his own Google+ post: “We want to formally retire the notion that a Google+ membership is required for anything at Google… other than using Google+ itself.”

So, no—Google+ isn’t going away completely. But it will seem less invasive to users who simply don’t want to use it. Once again, Google proves it knows what’s best for their users—and for their brand.

Do You Need to Be On Google Plus?

With all the upcoming changes, you have to ask yourself: Does your business need to maintain a Google Plus page?

That depends. Do you want to increase your chances of showing up on Google searches? Because there’s evidence that having a Google Plus page for your business is great for SEO purposes. Google provides businesses with the opportunity to interact with customers in the places and apps they visit and use every day. With the daily ease-of-use of YouTube, Google Plus Photos, and Google Plus Hangouts, the customer engagement is nearly limitless.

So for those of you who thought it was dead, face it: The Google+ we knew (and maybe even loved) is going away, and a tighter, more focused product will remain in its place.

I learned a valuable lesson about buying watches from a shop in Hong Kong.

While on a business trip to China, I got pulled into a back room and was offered five luxury watches for a steal.

They were counterfeit luxury watches. They looked really nice and I was tempted by the brand names on the watches – Breitling, Louis Vuitton, Rolex. And against my better judgement, I violated all the sensible watch-buying rules ever written and paid $100 for each watch.

I have never worn those watches.

I wasted $500 that day – please learn from my mistakes in this article so you can make a smart buying decision when purchasing a watch.

You see, a quality watch isn’t just a tool that shows time. A man’s watch is a sign of taste, where you are in life, and it’s something that shouldn’t be “faked." And let me be clear, any man can buy a great watch at a very affordable price.

Whether you’re looking for accuracy of time, a fashion accessory, or something you want to leave your grandkids – here are my five tips that will help you purchase the right timepiece.

1. Educate yourself on classic watch styles

To make a sensible and practical wristwatch purchase – you have to go out there and learn more about watches. There is a whole industry built around horology – the science of making timepieces.

For centuries watchmakers have honed their craft to create complicated pieces of mechanism that are built to outlive the person wearing them.

Numerous websites and blogs offer the latest news on wristwatch designs. You can even browse through brand specific websites to see  what makes watches like Rolex, Breitling, Seiko, Vacheron Constantin or Patek Philippe tick. Lifestyle journals also offer advice on selecting timepieces of men, check The Gentleman’s Gazette, ABlogToWatch, and Art of Manliness.

Get excited about watches and you’ll then find the time to discover why so many men love them!

Get to know a local watchmaker or jeweler – they are storehouses of knowledge and are always willing to talk about different wristwatch options. The salesperson at your local watch store will be more than willing to recommend watches to suit your lifestyle.

Magazines like GQ and Esquire publish regular features on watches and advertise new and classic models.

If you prefer to use an app, check out Watchville.

2. Understand the true value of a watch

One of the first criteria that comes up in a watch purchase is price. However, it is more important to consider the value of a watch before discussing pricing.

A simple formula to assess the value of a watch:

(Frequency Of Use * The Feelings Associated With Wearing It)/ The Price Of The Watch

Price is not the most important thing. Although most of have a specific budget in mind, it is better to spend a little extra to buy a quality watch.

Remember the fake watches I bought in Hong Kong? They represent no value to me because I don’t wear them.

On the other hand, I now wear a brand in The Fifth Watches that, although less famous than many, feels and looks great on my wrist. Their watches are a well-made classic design, Bauhaus to be exact and work well with my personal style.

Although they have a short history I love The Fifth Watches story as an Australian family run business looking to disrupt the industry with fun watches that are affordable. I find I wear my new watch everyday – already I’ve gotten my money’s worth and the value is high. That’s what you want to strive for in any watch you purchase, wear it, love it, and reduce the cost per wear to pennies!

3. Watches & buyer protection

Be careful when purchasing watches online.

Check the reputation of both the dealer and company first. If they’re new, make sure they have testimonials and/or a strong social media presence where they are engaging with customers and following up with questions.

Make sure to find a manufacturer who is willing to ensure quality will exchange watches that have been damaged in shipping or have manufacturing defects.

You are also more likely to get standard issue warranties to cover repairs from certified dealers or when you buy from the manufacture themselves.

4. The economics of watch pricing

The different grades of watches vary in the craftsmanship, quality of materials used, and amount of labor involved.

Timepieces under $250 – Consumer Watches

These are considered fashion watches that you can purchase to wear with an outfit. You are not going to feel too bad if they break after a couple of years. Although watches in this category are not meant to be heirloom pieces, you can find some great deals here and a well made watch at this price point can last decades.

Under $1,000 – Brand & Enthusiast Watches

This is a good price range for men with disposable income looking to purchase their first statement quality watch.

Of all the ranges – this is the one that has the widest variety of quality levels and you can find deals or get ripped off. I advise you not buying your first watch at this price point as you’ll want to have tested a few at lower price points to ensure you’re going to get your money’s worth and enjoyment from a watch at this level.

Think of watches at this level as a gateway to the next price point!

$1,000 – $10,000 – Luxury Watches

This is the bracket of well known names. You get what you pay for here and once you start to spend this type of money you need to know more about watches than 99% of men or else you’re getting ripped off.

Luxury watches by definition, are exclusive items and signal to certain people your ability to afford them.

Over $10,000 – Ultra Luxury Watches

At this level it’s not uncommon for diamonds, gold and other precious stones to be on the watch face.

Many of the of these watches are not available for public sale, and are controlled and only made available to select clientele. Most of these exclusive watches carry a rich heritage of exquisite craftsmanship and exceptional quality.

Watches as an investment?

All the more power to you if you can afford a 10K watch, but in general watches are not an investment. It is unlikely that you will retrieve the money spent on it when trying to sell under duress. It’s like buying a Harley Davidson motorcycle, it’s only worth what a buyer will pay for it.

5. Find enjoyment in wearing your watch

A good quality watch is an expression of your individualism. Only buy a watch that your are going to enjoy and love wearing.

Choose it yourself because it should reflect your personality. Unlike other items that men traditionally buy to express themselves, such as cars, a wristwatch is on constant display.

Watches are practical purchases that can be worn for decades. A fine wristwatch can signify a milestone or an achievement like graduating from college or getting your first job.

It stays on your hand as a reminder of what you have achieved.

Watches are not just a functional piece – you need to enjoy wearing it too.

SEE ALSO: The best men's watches at every price point

DON'T FORGET: Follow Business Insider's Lifestyle page on Facebook!

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 4 things a leader should never do

Trying to pique readers’ curiosity to entice them to open an email is so 2009. The world of email subject lines is growing more sophisticated as emailers grow more spam and sales savvy. It’s safe to say your subject line is more important than ever. Coming up with them can be fun, though, if you use some of these tips.

Statistics show that 64 percent of people will open an email because of the subject line, and nearly half of them list that as their only deciding factor. Email is powerful, and your subject line is key to unlocking that power.

To help you create successful subject lines, we’ve put together a list of unique tips. These tips aren’t your ordinary, everyday tips like “Be creative.” These five tips are meant to get your creative juices flowing.

1. Try a pop culture reference

There is nothing – we mean nothing – like a clever or punny pop culture reference. You might quote a line from a movie, reference a bit of celebrity gossip or use a song title. Now is a perfect time for this type of title because there’s a wealth of pop culture. Plus, Netflix-type services are also helping people connect with classic movies, music and TV shows. Brainstorm ideas and keep a notebook handy for particularly memorable puns you think of or come across.

2. Hashtag it up 

Talk of trending topics and other references to social media can also attract readers. Consider drawing inspiration from weekly hashtags or recent trends. Do you use Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest? Move those principles over to your email regimen.

This email with a hashtag in its subject line shows great social media savvy. The line could appear as a Facebook or Twitter post.

3. Give and ye shall receive

Modern marketing relies on the idea of giving to your customers before you ask them to buy from you. To get people to click your emails, tell them what you’re offering – but be sure not to oversell it. Try offering a gift with purchase, discounted shipping or a free consultation. By giving something of value to your customers, they are more likely to come back for additional products or services.

4. Tell a joke

You might make them laugh with a pithy observation, some sort of joke or even just a funny anecdote. If you visit any humor sites, watch sitcoms or follow any humor feeds on social media, think about something that made you laugh and how you might translate that principle to an email subject title.

Try looking through these tips for increasing your subject line humor, too.

5. Be descriptive

If it feels forced, you’re overwhelmed, or you just can’t come up with anything, it’s not the end of the world. Just give a descriptive subject with your most important words near the front of the line. Describe a new product or give specific details about an upcoming sale.

Subject lines can be as fun to create as they are to read. With a little practice and help from the tips above, you can create some memorable subject lines that get customers to react.

To continue to find subject line inspiration, look through our list of great subject lines and see what moves you.

A lot of people who do search engine optimization for a living think in terms of how to manipulate Google so that their site will show up more highly. There will always be ways to manipulate the search results, but Google is getting better and better at what it does, and eventually I would recommend focusing instead on what Google really wants to see. Google always says “produce great content and the rest will take care of itself.” That is becoming more and more true each month. In this post, I thought I would identify what Google really wants to see in a website. You should consider these things and focus your attention more on trying to do what Google really wants rather than just trying to manipulate the search results.

Regularly Published Content

Google ideally wants to see websites remain active. It shows that the site owner is committed to providing value to his/her readers and really cares about the quality of the site. Some local businesses might not think it makes any sense to regularly update their site, but having a blog is an easy way to keep a site that’s active. You should do whatever you can to make sure you are adding good, new content to your site.

New Content Slowly Gets More Social Media Activity

If you publish good content, Google would expect that eventually you will start to get likes, shares, etc. on social media. If you never get any social media activity for any of your content, Google will never think your content is of much value. What you need to do as a site owner is become active on social media, interact with your readers and other people in your industry, and naturally you should start getting social media activity to the new content you produce.

Links To The Site Don’t Just Point To One Page

One of the biggest indicators of manipulation in Google’s eyes is when all the links pointing to a site go to one page. This is not natural at all in Google’s eyes. What it would rather see is that the site puts out a lot of content and gets lots of links to many different pages on the site. Once Google switched to focusing on domain authority more, this has become more and more important. You can easily trip a filter if you get a lot of links that just point to one page on your site. Avoid this by focusing on distributing the links that you get to as many pages as possible.

Pages Are Written For Humans And Not For Search Engines

Back in the day, you used to be able to stuff your keyword into your content, title tag, h1 tags, etc. and see a big jump in the rankings. Google hates that because writing in such a manner doesn’t add a lot of value to human readers. Google has slowly cracked down on people trying to game the system that way. Ideally, a site owner doesn’t even consider SEO when writing content and just writes in a way that would most benefit the reader. Google hasn’t perfected this yet, but eventually it will really crack down on people trying to game the system by writing in a way that is intended to boost search engine rankings rather than benefit readers.

Site Owners Are Active And Provide Value On Other Sites Like Reddit And Quora

Google likes when site owners prove they are experts in their field by being active on other authoritative sites like Reddit and Quora. If you answer relevant questions on Quora, or you do an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, you are proving to Google you are serious about your site and are truly an expert on the topic. Historically, doing this hasn’t really benefited a site’s rankings very much, but that has started to change. I now recommend being as active as possible on high authority and social sites.

These are the main things Google wants to see in an ideal website. As you move forward, you should start thinking about SEO in these terms rather than trying to “game the system” or manipulate the search results. It’s better to think about achieving long-lasting rankings rather than short-term jumps.

“You don’t really mean call 1,000 prospects, do you?”

Yes. I do mean call 1,000 prospects. Unless you have a list that you have built that is big enough—and well defined enough—to create more than enough opportunities, you need to make a lot of calls.

The First Third

At any given time, one-third of the prospects on your list will be dissatisfied. You have no idea which third of these prospects are dissatisfied. And you have no idea who within these prospects is motivated to change.

There is no list that you can buy that will tell you who is dissatisfied, why they are dissatisfied, and how motivated they are to improve things (and downloading a white paper or attending a webinar provides very little proof when it comes to real dissatisfaction).

The Last Third

Another third of your prospects are thrilled beyond belief with the company that sells them whatever you sell.

There is no way to tell by looking at a prospect list who is happy with their current provider. You might have some insight as to when they changed, but even that is no guarantee that they aren’t dissatisfied enough to change again.

The fact that so many people tell you that they are happy when you cold call them tells you nothing about whether they are dissatisfied enough to change. Mostly, it tells you that they didn’t hear enough value in your pitch.

The Middle Third

The middle third is made up of prospects that are neither happy or unhappy. The dissatisfaction they should have lies dormant. They aren’t in love with the people they work with, and they aren’t unhappy enough about anything to take action. They’re coasting along with things as they are.

It’s easier to create opportunities where major dissatisfaction exists. But it feels like this middle third is more like ninety percent of companies, even though that isn’t true.

You can develop the case for change within this third, even if it isn’t easy.

Make Your Calls

You are never going to know which prospect belongs in which category unless you pick up the phone and call them. The copied and pasted email isn’t going to help you. The comments you are making in LinkedIn groups aren’t going to tell you who is who either.

You can make the calls you need to make in a few weeks. Or you can take forever and never succeed at building the pipeline you need—or the opportunities you should be working on.

Make your calls.

• How do you find the prospects who are dissatisfied enough to consider changing?
• How do you identify the prospects where you might be locked out due to some sort of mismatch that would disqualify them?
• How do you determine who has a form of dissatisfaction that is lying dormant, waiting to be developed?

The post The Prospecting Rule of Thirds appeared first on The Sales Blog.

It’s not a secret, to truly succeed in today’s marketing world, you need to be able to track and report on the results from your efforts. But where do you begin? How do you consolidate your findings and present them effectively to your team or client? We’ve got you covered. Below is a quick-start marketing reporting guide to help you kick off your efforts.

Tell a Story

I’m sure you’ve heard this line a million times but it’s so true: Tell a story. Stories captivate people and make things interesting. A client may not love seeing a bunch of numbers on a screen, but putting a story around those numbers makes them interesting.

It’s important that from the get-go you understand your client’s goals and objectives that they want to achieve from marketing. It helps to dictate your efforts but it also allows you to tie your results back to the previously stated goals, making everything come full-circle.

Have you ever heard of closed-loop marketing? If not, it’s time you have. Closed-loop marketing tracks marketing channels from the time a visitor lands on your site to the time your sales team closes a new customer. By implementing closed-loop marketing, not only will you be able to tell a fantastic story, you’ll also be able to show ROI to your client, which at the end of the day, that’s something almost all clients care most about.

Look for Trends

When you start to develop your story, it’s important to keep tabs on trends you’re seeing month over month. A one-off event may not be representative of current happenings with your campaign and you should pay attention to patterns. With that however, if there is a significant event that happens randomly in your month, it’s important to understand what it’s from, although it may not be necessary to factor in for your plan moving forward.

Assess Which Key Metrics to Include in Your Reporting

Your marketing reporting should be tailored specifically to the team/client you are reporting to. As mentioned previously, the metrics you report on should matter to your client and be relevant to your campaigns and marketing efforts. Honing in on the proper metrics may take some thought. Below are a few to keep in mind when putting your report together:

1. Total Reach
2. Reach by Source
3. Total Website Visits
4. Website Visits by Source
5. Total Leads Generated
6. Leads Generated by Source
7. Total Customers Driven by Marketing
8. Marketing-Generated Customers by Source
9. Visit-to-Lead Conversion Rate
10. Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
11. Visit-to-Customer Conversion Rate
12. Blog Performance
13. Page Performance
14. CTA Performance
15. Campaign Performance as a Whole
16. Landing Page Performance

Set Up Your Presentation

Depending on the size of your marketing campaign set up monthly or quarterly meetings with your client or team to present your findings, whether they be in-person or via a conference call.

Prior to the call, make sure you’ve put together a proper deck that relates to this client specifically. If you report on similar metrics month over month, it’s OK to create a template for your monthly reports, but remember you don’t have to strictly stick to it if you have other numbers and trends to report on. Some recommendation to include in your presentation include:

• Performance from the previous month or quarter
• An analysis of that time period
• A plan of attack moving forward based off those findings.

During the presentation, don’t feel the need to touch on every single detail in your report, or reflect on every number. However, you need to be prepared for people to ask about them. Be the expert on all things related to the campaign so that if somebody throws you a curveball question, you’ll be prepared to answer it. With that being said, if somebody asks a question that you don’t have the answer to, don’t make something up. Acknowledge it and respond by saying something like “You know, I’m not sure at the moment but let me do some research and I’ll send you a follow-up email. Does that work for you?” Be honest with the people you’re presenting to. They can tell if you aren’t.

Although you should keep the meeting professional, a successful meeting will also allow some time for you to get to know your client as a person. Find similarities and fun conversation talking points. The better a client knows you, the more likely they’ll be to trust your recommendations, and the flow of the presentation will go much smoother. Plus, you’ll look forward to the calls with the team because you’ll have fun things to talk about in addition to business.

Marketing reporting doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Once you figure out a formula that works best for you in putting these reports together, you’ll find that they’re not only useful for your client, but for yourself as well to help you put the best plan together as possible for them.

What have you found useful when reporting on your marketing efforts?

Canada's in rough shape.

The country's statistics agency released GDP data on Friday that showed the Canadian economy shrank by 0.2% in May.

That's worse than expectations of 0.0% growth, and it's the fifth consecutive month the economy contracted.

Weighing on the economy were the manufacturing and mining, oil, and gas extraction sectors. Wholesale trade was also down.

Manufacturing output contracted 1.7% in May to its lowest level in a year, following no growth in April, according to the report. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction fell 0.7%, down for the seventh consecutive month.

The oil crash, and a smoked loonie

The drop in oil prices that began more than a year ago has been hard on the net oil-exporting nation.

Major oil producers like Schlumberger are now cutting jobs, and Alberta, Canada's main oil-producing province, saw its unemployment rate jump from 5.5% to 5.8% in May.

It looks like the effect of falling commodities prices on the Canadian economy is not going to let up any time soon. That's according to a note from BNP Paribas' Derek Lindsey.

The Bank of Canada cut interest rates last month and now it's likely to continue easing, Lindsey noted.

Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz has yet to use the word "recession," preferring to describe the economic situation as a "complex and significant adjustment."

The Canadian dollar — aka the loonie — is weak. Here's what's happened with the currency over the past year:

One bubbly bright spot

Not all economic sectors contracted in May. Construction was up slightly, and Canadians continued to spend money on their homes. An increase in retail trade was driven by spending on building material, garden equipment, and supplies, according to the report.

Meanwhile, housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are still super hot. Canadian home prices did not drop nearly as much as home prices in the US during the housing-market crash, and they've soared ever since.

In Toronto, home prices are reportedly 42% higher than they were in 2008. Home prices in Vancouver are the second-most expensive in the world.

Economist Robert Shiller suggested back in 2012 that Canada could experience a slow-motion version of the US housing bust.

According to BNP’s Lindsey, "investment and exports remain in contractionary territory and the economy remains vulnerable to a correction in housing and a pull-back in spending due to high levels of household debt."

Looking forward

So what's to come for Canada? The country is due for a general election this year.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party have been in power since 2006, and have consistently campaigned on the economy. He's expected to formally launch his campaign as early as Sunday.

A strong economic record leading up to and after the financial crisis meant political success for the fiscally conservative party. No banks had to be rescued after the crisis and housing prices didn't plunge. Exports were weak, but overall, the recession was much less painful in Canada than in the US.

By 2010, the economy had fully recovered.

Now things could change for Harper's conservatives. After nine and a half years of conservative leadership, it's hard to gauge what economic policies the rival Liberal Party would pursue.

A statement on the Liberal Party website reads: "The world has changed in the last 10 years ... Now and in the future, the path to economic growth and good middle class jobs is through strong environmental policy."

The New Democratic Party, the official opposition party in parliament, recently released "5 signs that Stephen Harper's economic plan just isn't working." No alternative solutions were offered.

The upcoming election, expected to be held in mid-October, will be worth watching.

SEE ALSO: The drop in commodity prices is destroying Canada's economy

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“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It sounds pretty basic…getting to know your buyer before you build a Demand Generation program seems like common sense. Then why are so many Enterprise B2B marketers missing the mark?

ANNUITAS recently published the first B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study to understand what drives this unique group of marketers. In it, the use of buyer personas was explored and surprisingly only 44% of enterprise B2B organizations use buyer personas as part of their Demand Generation planning. Combine that with the findings that two-thirds are running more than 15 programs a year and less than 3% rate themselves as effective, and a very reactive picture starts to emerge. As CMOs are being asked to do more and are required to drive more revenue for their organizations, they must become experts on the buyer to turn the situation around. Activity without insights will not get them there.

Include the Buyers
Demographic information is critical for most marketers using buyer personas according to the ANNUITAS research. About 60% also include buyer pain points, but how do they build these insights?

Marketing and sales roles provide most of the inputs to buyer personas with about half of respondents interviewing customers and a third interviewing prospects. Marketers should be wary of inside out thinking as the view of the buyer seen through internal filters can miss insights that impact the buying process.

This potential for internal bias has repercussions across Demand Generation programs. It shows up when only 43% of content is reported as aligning to buyer pain points and 28% report aligning content to the buyer journey stages. Speaking to buyers directly provides insights that can’t be gleaned from secondary research or internal sources alone.

Another key component of the buyer persona is understanding the buying process. However, according to the ANNUITAS study, only about 33% of B2B Enterprise marketers include this key insight in their efforts. The buying process information provides a critical link between pain points and the content consumption patterns of the buyer. This also indicates buying intent so it should not be overlooked.

Uncovering Insights
How should B2B Enterprise marketers approach buyer insights? There are four key areas of focus.

• Uncover environmental factors common in the industry and the marketplace. Secondary research is good for surfacing what issues are being discussed, but buyers can confirm whether something is vendor-hype or part of the critical challenges they face. Buyers will also provide stories that add color and dimension to your buyer personas that are often missing from facts and figures in analyst reports.

• Dig into business pain points, including the day-to-day. Sometimes even seemingly mundane issues lead to critical insights about how buyers consume content or delegate purchasing roles, to name a few.

• Buying process questions should cover the process itself, stakeholders and, in the case of customers, how the sales process matched up with their buying needs. Uncovering these internal barriers to conversion can be a valuable part of conducting buyer persona research.

• Get to know their content consumption preferences and patterns. Are they checking their Twitter feed multiple times a day or do they depend on local events and industry publications for most of their information? What type of information do they look for at different stages of the journey, and who do they trust to deliver it?

Buyer personas can be invaluable to B2B Enterprise marketers if they’re intentional and insightful instead of something that just “checks the box.” Becoming experts on the buyer will ensure that marketers build programs that have the right starting point, with clear guideposts along the way to building a Demand Generation program that delivers results.

Look around and it seems pretty obvious that technology has made daily life easier.

We can watch almost any film or listen to any song at the press of a button. People pay their bills on their mobile phones. Stressed parents get to dodge trolley tantrums by swapping the supermarket run for online shopping. And let’s not mention all that free online news.

But, for all the convenience that new innovations afford us, what if this rise of technology is actually exacerbating inequality?

There are certainly some red flags right now.

The first warning signs come from financial markets where technology stocks have soared this year.

Search engine Google’s shares recently hit a record high of over $700, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world, second only to that other tech giant Apple. The moves have fired up the tech-heavy Nasdaq index and taken it back to the giddy heights of the dotcom bubble 15 years ago.

The problem is not rising share prices per se, but rather what they are telling us about the power of shareholders and the consequences in terms of what is left over to be invested in wages and innovation.

This question of how the profits of technology trickle down is explored in the recent book iDisrupted by economist Michael Baxter and entrepreneur John Straw.

Analysing the economic impact of emerging technologies, they highlight two potential agents for rising inequality.

Firstly, patents, and the way they ensure that profits from innovation accrue to larger companies and their owners.

“The existence of patents may mean that the majority of wealth created from innovations boosts the wealth of the very richest in society, but restricts the extent of trickle down,” they write.

Secondly, the fact more goods are being offered for free online.

The problem with this is that just about the only means left to fund digital products is advertising, a sector where revenues are increasingly dominated by a handful of companies such as Google and Facebook.

“Without the enormous volume of content on the internet, there would be little point in either search or social media,” write Baxter and Straw. “Yet the revenue from this content accrues to the companies that provide search and social media, not the producers of content.”

Those two trends play out in the very modern context of lawyered-up, patent-hungry tech giants and the emergence of a free online economy. But at their heart lies a very long-standing tie between ownership and profits.

Indeed, the challenge of fairly sharing the spoils of growth has risen hand-in-hand with shareholder power, according to the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane.

He concludes that companies are paying out too much to shareholders when they should be investing more. Shareholders are also being put before employees, but there is nothing new there, says Haldane, citing an example from almost a century ago involving the carmaker Henry Ford.

In a speech published last week, Haldane said:

“In the US in 1919, a case against Henry Ford was brought before the Michigan supreme court by the Dodge brothers, a minority shareholder. They challenged Ford’s decision to reinvest the firm’s profits to expand the business and pay better wages, which they felt contradicted the purposes of the corporation – maximising shareholder return. The court ruled that Ford owed a duty to his shareholders and ordered him to pay a special dividend.”

There are clearly parallels with the modern-day tension between Apple and its activist investor Carl Icahn, who campaigned to encourage the iPhone maker to increase returns to shareholders.

The authors of iDisrupted also look to Ford in their argument on the importance of profits trickling down.

They cite the carmaker’s doubling of wages at his factory to $5 a day and the oft-disputed claim that his motivation was the hope other manufacturers would follow suit and so the potential number of car buyers would rise.

It may be the stuff of myths, but a century later the story provides a neat way of explaining how a rising gap between the few haves and the many have-nots could stop technological advances in their tracks.

Baxter and Straw sum this up: “Those who suggest that technology may create a world of extreme inequality may be right, but equally it may be that unless the profits from technology trickle down, pushing up wages and creating demand, then further technological evolution may be impossible.

“If technology leads to more inequality, it may have the effect of suffocating demand from the economy and can become self-destroying, making further technological evolution redundant as only the few could afford it.”

They are right to worry about the prospects for innovation just as Haldane is right to worry about investment, whether it is in training, innovation or machinery.

You only have to look at the figures on the UK’s woeful productivity performance in recent years. BoE deputy governor Jon Cunliffe underscored these in a recent speech.

“In the 10 years prior to the crisis, growth in the hours worked in the UK economy accounted for 23% of overall economic growth. The mainstay of economic growth, the other 77%, came from growth in productivity,” he said.

“Since 2013, only 9% of UK annual economic growth has come from productivity improvement. The remaining 91% has come from the increase in the total hours worked.”

For companies that want to thrive, the message is clear. For policymakers looking to solve Britain’s productivity puzzle, there are lessons too.

It’s time to ditch the financial engineering and put more into innovation: the swathe of companies using ultra-low interest rates to fund acquisitions would do better to invest in ideas and equipment.

And it’s time to claw back power from shareholders: stop pouring money into dividends and instead let employees share some of the gains.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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Brands send powerful messages through how they price. Price can be influential in portraying a brand as affordable and ‘on the side of the customer’, or exclusive and just for the few. It can generate responses ranging from the thrill of a bargain to the indignation of a price tag that seems far too steep.

As Martin Bishop explained here, the pricing mechanisms that generate those emotions are increasingly varied, ranging from the ‘lock-them-in’ attraction of unbundled fares for those lured by what it says on the tag to the dynamic pricing of hotels and Uber that re-sets worth based on current demand.

Economists tend to view pricing as an expression of supply and demand, with scarcity increasing price and over-supply pushing prices down. While those dynamics are true for commodities, they don’t always apply to brands. And that’s because brands look beyond market logistics for proof of value. They draw on powerful attributes like perception, aesthetic and story to move the brand’s price beyond what the market would otherwise ask. In fact, through its choice of pricing, a brand sends three important signals to its target markets.

1. Access – price makes a product or service rare or plentiful, regardless of the actual production cost. That, in turn, decides who even looks and who doesn’t.

In keeping with its luxury technology status, Apple prices its products high. In so doing, it not only confines its buyers to those who are passionate about the brand, it also reinforces that Apple products are not for everyone. Walmart does the opposite. By dropping its prices to the point where it now matches online retailers, the brand reinforces the value of buying physically, directly addressing the showrooming issues that plague retailers elsewhere. The clear intention is to lift foot traffic. In this context, price lays out the welcome mat.

2. Confidence – a brand shows its hand through its price. If it prices high, it tells the market that it backs itself to deliver greater perceived value and that it intends to depend on that superiority to achieve a sustainable premium. Premium priced brands believe in the quality and rarity of what they do, validating their pricing through perceptions of exclusivity and strong storylines built around history, craft and luxury.

If a brand prices low, it telegraphs a belief that it can depend on volume to offset smaller margins and maybe that it will squeeze its supply chain for every ounce of efficiency it can find. Low priced brands believe in their ability to generate mass interest.

If it prices dynamically, then a brand is indicating that it will price where it has to in order to achieve its targets. That requires high confidence in the ability of the business to read the market and respond with unwavering accuracy. And if it prices in an unbundled way, then the brand does not see the core service as its core source of margin and will aggressively up- and cross-sell to recoup what it has ‘given away’ with its asking price. Such a brand believes that its add-ons are either necessary and/or attractive enough to deliver targeted profits.

3. Worth – a brand talks powerfully to the image and priorities of consumers through its pricing. Those schemas help a buyer decide whether a given item on a given day in a given situation is worth it. For some that will be about what they can save; for others what they can get; for still others, what they will feel and remember.

As I pointed out here on Branding Strategy Insider, “No-one will do this uniformly…Depending on what’s important to us, we’ll shift between budget, standard and luxury in most of our purchases. That makes understanding what we are getting for our money even more important. The key point for brands is that they need to make it very clear to their customers what the trade-offs are. Most don’t. They don’t carry storylines that explain why consumers are paying what they’re paying and why they’re getting what they pay for.”

When you frame pricing through the lens of the three signals, it shifts the function of pricing considerably. Price becomes a symbol for who you want to include, what you back yourselves to deliver and what you want buyers to feel. Pricing in other words is reflective of the wider business strategy, not just the financials. It expresses where you want to be in a market and therefore who you intend to compete against and on what basis. It puts a value on what you sell for the whole world to see. To me, it is the very point of branding.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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EXCLUSIVE:

In a time when the plaudits and big funding rounds are often delivered to those with no product, no stock, and few actual employees (think AirBnB, Uber, et. al.), it is easy to forget about those who make the world go around for the eight million B2B businesses in America.

Salespeople.

Suited and booted, or dressed to impress, an army of professional talkers, listeners, and problem solvers wend their way across the United States, hoping to find buyers who want what they’re selling.

The infinitely repeated journey that starts with finding the decision maker and ends with closing the deal has many a genesis story — the most hated of all being the “cold call.”

Today, LeadFuze has announced a new sales prospecting tool that intends to sound the death knell for the call that salespeople the world over dread making.

The new LeadFuze product allows users to create lists of potential business leads through social networks, including LinkedIn and Twitter. LeadFuze’s software then verifies those prospects’ email addresses by pinging the server, paving the way for businesses to send a carefully crafted email.

“We wanted to put an end to cold calls,” Justin McGill, Founder and CEO at LeadFuze, told me. “Salespeople hate making them, and decision makers hate receiving them. Our tools are built with the goal of helping both salespeople and startups by warming up conversations through email and social media before a call ever takes place.”

That “carefully crafted email” is one area of concern with a tool such as this. I receive half-a-dozen sales pitches a day, and while I don’t have the data, I’d estimate that not more than 10 percent of them are written well.

That aside, this new tool is one of many I’ve seen that are placed to help promote “social sales” — the act of using social networks to engage with a prospect in order to set a mutually beneficial time to talk, rather than interrupting their day in the hope they’ll speak to you.

I wondered how this solution is different from the competition.

“This is different from Rapportive, FullContact, and Thrust.io as it essentially combines all three of those in one click of a button,” McGill said. “Once you run your search — by job title, industry, location, etc. — you are presented with people that match that criteria. You then click to add them; our tool goes and finds their email addresses, pulls in social data, etc.”

And while this is good for the salesperson, it does open up a few questions about spam legislation. What many people don’t know is that personal email addresses are different from business email addresses in many countries, especially the U.S. and the U.K. Business addresses are “fair game” for an introductory email, as long as you follow the rules.

In the U.S., under CAN-SPAM legislation, those rules include identifying yourself properly and offering a way for people to unsubscribe from further communications (among other things). In Canada, however, the recently-introduced CASL legislation goes much further, and salespeople who send unwelcome correspondence could find themselves in very hot water.

VB’s new email marketing buyer’s guide is available for
$299 on VB Insight, or free with your martech subscription

Is LeadFuze doing anything to ensure that salespeople know what they should and shouldn’t do, especially in light of the heavy penalties they face under CASL?

“Canada’s laws are very strict on cold email, and we would not want you using the tool to cold email people in Canada as you would be getting yourself into trouble,” McGill said. “Ultimately, the user is able to pull in prospects as they want, so it is up to the user to obey the laws in their country.”

So the short answer there is “no.” Salespeople will need to educate themselves as to what is right and wrong — the tool isn’t going to do that for you, or direct you in any particular way.

That said, the old-fashioned cold call has, in all likelihood, had its day, and “warming up” a conversation with someone who has a legitimate problem to solve, when you have a legitimate solution to offer, is a better way forward. So what are the benefits of LeadFuze’s approach versus engaging a prospect first on social media?

“Though the tool was built with cold email in mind, we also capture their social media profiles,” McGill said. “So the user can indeed warm up a call first by connecting with them on social and starting the conversation there as well.”

Email legislation concerns aside, LeadFuze adds another prospecting tool to the salesperson’s armory — one that could save countless hours of hopeless interruptions in the search to find the one decision maker who needs what you have to offer that day. LeadFuze’s tool launches today with pricing starting at $69 per month.

Of course, salespeople will have to educate themselves on how to send the right kind of introductory email and make sure to conform to all the right regulations, or the tool will simply help them fail faster than ever before. Caveat venditor!

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If you’re like most B2B marketers, you’re probably thinking of dialing down your lead generation efforts for the summer. But here’s the undeniable truth: no matter the time of the year, your pipeline, big or small, is what fuels your business. So while you may find yourself scaling back, you can’t put all marketing on pause. And since slow times are always followed by busier ones, why not use this time to sharpen your focus and stay ahead of the game? Here’s how, in 3 steps:

1. Review Your SEO Strategy

If the thought of doing a competitive analysis makes you shudder, don’t worry. You don’t have to completely overhaul your SEO to make a greater impact. Two main tasks can significantly boost your page rankings over time: – Research your keywords to ensure their validity and find untapped opportunities to introduce new key phrases. – Optimize your page titles and Meta descriptions to do at least one of the following:

• Align with the copy on the page, whether through current or new keywords and phrases
• Leverage your USP and/or differentiators
• Make benefit-rich statements that connect with prospects
• Make a strong call-to-action

2. Revise Your Website CopyWith a refreshed SEO strategy, move on to your website:

• Update your blog and social media. They’re great traffic boosters, but blogs tend to fall quickly through the cracks in busier times. The summer slump gives you the time to update your editorial calendar and brainstorm new ideas. When you have a calendar ready, compile relevant free images to dress up your blog and social media posts.
• Refresh your website photos, home page sliders and About Us staff photos. (Summer interns count too!)
• Give your complete contact information and share all your social media handles. Incomplete contact information is a major deterrent to buyers, so make sure yours figures prominently on your Contact Us page and throughout your website, whether in headers or footers.
• Check in on the competition. They may or may not be snoozing off the summer. Either way, it’s the perfect time to scope their website and identify what you can do better.

3. Audit Your Content for Gaps

Slow periods are perfect for auditing your content and finding opportunities to bridge any gaps. First, ask these questions:

• Does your content address each phase of your buying cycle, or lean heavily on one or two phases?
• Does it answer questions and address objections, or rest on fluffy, generic company accolades?
• Does your content engage, educate and entertain readers, or fall flat without a discernable voice?
• Is your lead generation bait enduring, or out of touch with today’s current market realities?
• Does your USP or value proposition figure prominently throughout your content, or sit inconspicuously on your About Us page?

Even this part needn’t be exhaustive. By enlisting other stakeholders to help, you’ll get a fresh perspective, with deeper insight into what’s not working well and how to make selling easier.

Summer is the ideal time to evaluate your marketing efforts and start shifting them accordingly. Follow these steps and start turning up the head on your lead generation. Before you know it, you’ll be armed and dangerous when fall kicks in.

Want to learn more about best practices for consistent growth through lead generation? Check out this OMI class: Increase Lead Generation Quality, Conversion & Velocity.

Listening is the most important life skill!

Quick quiz:

How do you rate your listening skills?

1. Do you consider yourself to be a great listener?
2. Do you consider your listening skills as not so great?
3. Do you think you could improve your ability to listen?

EVERYONE should answer yes to question 3.

My goal in this speech is to motivate you to become a better listener and to impart a couple of techniques and resources that will help you become a better listener.

In my talk this morning, I’m going to explain why listening is the most important life skill.

Next, I’m going to explain the various types of listening and discuss some of the barriers to listening,

Finally, I’m going to explain how you can become a better listener.

Let’s begin with why listening is so important.

Why Do We Listen?

Listening is the most important life skill!

We Toastmasters are all here to become better speakers, how come there’s no equivalent “Listening masters”, where people can go and learn to become great listeners?

Becoming a better listener has the potential to transform the quality of our lives both at work and at home.

• At work, the great managers and leaders who inspire us are great listeners in addition to being great speakers.
• At home, becoming a better listener has the power to strengthen the relationships with our loved-ones, family and friends.

A question for you. Think back over the past 2 weeks and the new people you met and spent more than 5 minutes with – what feeling did you take away from the encounter?

Do you think your feeling would be more positive if the person you met did all of the talking, or if you felt truly listened to and understood?

Why do we listen then?

• To get information; we ask questions and listen to the answers.
• To build understanding and fully comprehend the subject/idea/concept.
• To learn and acquire knowledge.
• For enjoyment – the sound of nature, the sea, music, poetry, the spoken word.
• For Social intercourse.

Having established why listening is so important, it is appropriate to explore what we do when we listen.

What Are Listening Levels And Barriers To Listening

Ignoring

We are all familiar with this; you’re trying to get your point across in a meeting or presentation and half of the people in the room are on smart phones. It’s frustrating and just plain rude.

Pretending To Listen

This is where you give the appearance of being engaged, but your mind is elsewhere. You are familiar with this if you are a buyer, pretending to listen to the sales pitch, when you already know what you want and need.

Selective Listening

Salespeople are guilty of this, tuning-in for buying signals, objections or pain, instead truly listening to gain comprehension. Married couples are also good at selective listening, tuning-out anything that sounds like nagging, complaining or “honey-do’s.”

Attentive Listening

Imagine you are the newly appointed country manager for an American subsidiary in Japan. Your plane just touched down, you don’t speak the language, but had a month long language course prior to arrival.

This is exactly what happened to former IBM chairman Sam Palmisano. Someone asked Sam in an IBM executive meeting why his time in Japan was so important to his leadership development…his answer is telling.

“Because I learned to listen.” He also said, “I learned to listen by having only one objective: comprehension.
I was only trying to understand what the person was trying to convey to me. I wasn’t listening to critique or object or convince.”

Attentive listening is not the highest level of listening though.

Empathic Listening

Empathy is where we step into someone else’s shoes, understand what they are saying and reflecting back the emotions they are feeling. We can tell instinctively how truly interested and empathic the other person is when they listen to us. If these are the levels of listening, what prevents us from understanding?

Barriers To Listening – Our Perception Filters

All human communication is subject to deletions, distortions and generalizations. We cannnot possibly store or process everything we hear. We further filter our perception through behavioral filters including;

• Language
• Attitude
• Memories
• Decisions
• Metaprograms that unconsciously filter our perception.

If there are so many natural barriers to understanding and levels of listening, how can we become better listeners?

How To Become A Better Listener

We can become better listeners through practicing active listening and through the use of language.

Active listening at a high level means putting your thoughts on hold, getting into rapport, feeding back your understanding.

Active Listening

Rapport

• Listening starts with rapport.
• Rapport is a perfectly natural process and develops automatically in open and friendly conversation.
• All humans and many animals have mirror neurons that work unconsciously to enable us to experience the emotions the other person is feeling, just by tuning in to them.
• We can accelerate the process by initally by mirroring physiology, language, and tonality.

Paraphrase, repeat back, and ask questions to clarify understanding – get confirmation.

Use empathy to convey understanding, how they feel/ must have felt.

Linguistic Skill

Finally, language skill is important in reconstructing meaning from deletions, distortions, generalizations and perception filters.

Learning to unpack to the speakers language will help you become a better listener.

Drill-down on any surface-structure statements and fluffy language to get to deep structure of meaning the other person is trying to convey (or hide).

With that I’d like to summarize my talk today.

Summary

In summary, listening is the most important life skill as it has the ability to improve the quality of our life through transforming our relationships with loved ones and at work.

Now that we know the different types of listening and the barriers, we can work toward becoming better listeners, by practicing active listening and language skills.

Listening is hard, it takes effort and practice.

I wish you well in improving your listening skills.

Resources

Join a Toastmasters near you.

Get better at storytelling and story-tending by attending a StorySeekers workshop.

Explore the Psychology of Selling and understand Metaprograms and other techniques to level the playing field with buyers.

“It’s an election about who will protect our economy in a period of ongoing global instability,” Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, announced on Sunday as he officially kicked off the campaign for the federal elections on October 19. He’d just asked Governor General David Johnston to dissolve Parliament.

“Now is not the time for the kind of risky economic schemes that are doing so much damage elsewhere in the world,” he said. “It is time to stay the course and stick to our plan.”

Stay what course, exactly? Because Canada is likely in the middle of at least a “technical recession.”

At first, there was hope that only the oil patch would be headed that way. Now the oil patch is already there. In the city of Calgary, Alberta, the epicenter of the oil bust, home sales plunged 14% in July year-over-year, according to the Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB). Year-to-date, homes sales are down 25%.

Despite months of assurances that the oil bust and the broader commodities rout won’t spread into the rest of the Canadian economy, they’re now beautifully spreading into it.

The Business Barometer Index of small business confidence dropped in July to 58.2, the worst level since mid-2009, a level that corresponds with a shrinking economy. “One normally sees an index level of between 65 and 70 when the economy is growing at its potential,” the report said.

That’s what Statistics Canada has been confirming for months: on Friday, it reported that GDP in May fell for a 5th month in a row.

“Much worse than the flat print expected by consensus,” is how Matthieu Arseneau, a Senior Ecoomist at National Bank Financial explained the phenomenon:

Goods producing industries saw a 0.6% drop in output, as declines for mining and oil & gas (-0.7%), manufacturing (-1.7%) and utilities (-1.4%) dwarfed increases for construction (+1.0%) and agriculture (+0.2%). Industrial production fell 1.2% as a result. The services sector’s output also fell 0.1 % as declines in wholesaling (-1.0%), health (-0.4%), transportation & warehousing (-0.3%), finance/insurance (-0.3%) and information/culture (-0.3%) more than offset gains in retailing (+0.5%), accommodation/food services (+0.9%) and real estate (+0.4%).

The Canadian economy contracted roughly 1.8% annualized over the March-May period.

This chart by National Bank Financial shows the increasingly ugly economic scenario. Note how the economy shrank in six of the last seven months:

The report goes on:

While there were the expected declines from manufacturing, energy, and wholesale, the weakness of other sectors came a bit as a surprise. It will now take more than 1% growth in June to prevent Q2 GDP from printing negative. So, odds are that Canada’s economy contracted for the second straight quarter in Q2 (i.e. technical recession).

The goods producing industries took the biggest hit. Output in May fell 0.6%, down for the fifth month in a row. But the service sector, the beacon of hope in the Canadian economy, has now stalled too – it actually fell 0.1% in May:

But the all-important output of real estate agents and brokers rose 2.1%, up for a fourth month in a row. And construction grew 1.0%, “as engineering and repair construction as well as residential and non-residential building construction advanced,” Statistics Canada reported.

This is part of Canada’s magnificent housing bubble, which is still red-hot in Toronto and Vancouver, and must be maintained at all costs, for the benefit of all sectors involved, from construction to brokers. And so the Bank of Canada has cut interest rates in July to 0.5%, the second desperate cut this year [read… Bank of Canada Sees Global Economy, Freaks Out, Cuts Rate, Warns of Financial Stability Risks, Loonie Plunges].

But that magnificent housing bubble, which is already hissing hot air in the oil patch, is at risk even in Vancouver and Toronto, as Toronto-Dominion Bank warned on Friday:

When we put it all together, key housing indicators on balance continue to highlight the vulnerability of the Toronto and Vancouver housing markets to a significant correction in activity and prices.

In light of its hotter price performance over the past three to five years and greater supply risk, this vulnerability appears to be comparatively high in the Toronto market.

To soothe our already ragged nerves, TD Bank said that it sees for Toronto a “‘medium’ rather than ‘high’ risk to the kind of painful and disorderly price adjustment that was endured in the United States a half-decade ago.”

The most worrying metric in TD Bank’s color-coded indicator is the existing home price-to-income ratio. It’s dark red.

For years, prices have soared far faster than incomes. But even with ultra-low interest rates and aggressive lending, the pool of potential buyers is shrinking. And the market can’t rely forever on the influx of wealthy Chinese and other foreign buyers, while a growing portion of the local population is shoved aside.

As Canada is wobbling into at least a technical recession, the government has been adamant that it’s not heading into any kind of real recession. And that story must be kept alive until the election in October. So Canada-based cartoonist David Parkins puts the dilemma of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Joe Oliver into hilarious perspective:

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Do you ever overhear couples having a fight in public? We’ve all been there. (Let’s be honest, we’ve all likely been in of those fights before.) It happens. It’s cringeworthy. Dirty laundry is aired, private moments made public, and topics not meant for the glare of the public eye are brought to light.

But sometimes we can learn something from these arguments about our own relationship issues.

In the case of the business relationship between B2B marketing and sales, there are plenty of topics that commonly cause misalignment between the two groups. One such issue came to light recently in an ITSMA newsletter: A sales team, feeling territorial about “their” customers, was preventing marketing from interviewing them for primary buyer persona research.

What would you do in this situation? Read on for advice from the ITSMA:

Q: We’d really like to start building a solid set of buyer personas—based on direct interviews—to drive all of our marketing efforts, but one of the initial obstacles we face is our own sales team. They don’t want to let us near “their” customers. What should we do?

A: If it’s any consolation, this type of problem is anything but uncommon. It does make you wonder how the sales team can expect marketers to be omniscient and omnipresent without ever having a direct conversation with a customer, doesn’t it?

To win sales over on this one, you’ll need to do two things:

• Build their trust that you won’t mess up any of their dealings through the conversations you have.
• Show them how this initiative will directly benefit them, mainly by improving value propositions and making their own conversations with buyers more effective.

You’ve really got two options. One is to work incrementally with sales to bring them around as you build your research base. The other is to take an outside approach by recruiting interviewees much like you would for a focus group. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, either.

If you try the first approach, take it in small steps. You may have a target of 8 to 12 buyer interviews or more, but make the first objective to gather 3 to 5 of them. Start with one or two account executives with whom you or your marketing team have good relationships. Try to find the “friendlies” who are open to some new thinking and giving this a try. Explain that the objective of your research is to get a better understanding of buyer priority initiatives, success factors, decision criteria, and buying process in order to do a better job of identifying good prospects and to make the sales process easier. Make the point that these are conversations that will yield deep insights, not just a win-loss analysis. The goal is to get better at identifying potential buyers and building strong value propositions that will persuade the buyer to choose you—both activities designed to make the sales job easier.

Once you have a couple of account managers bought in, aim to do two or three interviews at each organization with different people involved in the purchase decision. That helps to build your initial base of research while getting a more refined view of the overall process without having to go to additional accounts.

Although multiple interviews with two accounts will not be enough to support the persona development process, they will be enough to generate some nuggets of insight that should help you win over more of the sales team. You may even get some positive feedback from customers about the research itself, which usually has much more sway with the sales team than marketing’s opinion alone.

The second approach requires that you work with an external partner that specializes in recruiting research participants. Here, you are recruiting interviewees much like you recruit focus group participants. Establish the criteria and have your research partner recruit individuals that match those criteria.

As you begin to get interviews, follow the same approach of identifying amenable account executives and discuss the project and nuggets with them. Even if you aren’t counting on support from sales for the initial research effort, you’ll still need them to buy into the results of the persona project, so this step can help lay the groundwork. Their support also becomes important as you build a process for maintaining and updating your personas. The only way to do this is—you guessed it—more buyer interviews.

How you decide to proceed will likely depend on the timeline you’re working within and the resources you have available, whether internal or external. There’s not really a right or wrong way to do it, as long as you get sales involved in the long-term process.

Private Equity is a big force in the investment scene. There are nearly 4,000 of these firms in the US, and they’ve invested in about 13,000 companies. They’re considered the “smart money” because of their acumen, insider knowledge, and ability to time the markets, which they have to in order to profitably exit their their long-term illiquid investments.

OK, even the smartest among them got caught with their pants down last year when the oil price crashed. And those that invested in natural gas drillers have been regretting this move for years, after the natural gas price crashed in 2009 without ever really recovering since. Fracking, which boomed thanks to a near endless flood of money from Wall Street, including PE firms, has dished out costly lessons in return.

So, even the ultimate “smart money” can get carried away by its own hype. But recently, they’ve been doing something else: they’ve been dumping existing investments at record pace.

In the second quarter this year, exit volume by US-based PE firms “exploded” to $125 billion, according to a report by the Private Equity Growth Capital Council. This includes sales to the public via IPOs and to “strategic and financial investors,” such as corporations.

It brought the first-half exit volume to $195 billion, up 46% from the same period in 2014 and up a stunning 275% from the same period in 2013. Something is going on, and they want out.

And they’re not going to slow down anytime soon, “as corporate acquirers clamor for deals,” according to The Wall Street Journal:

On Monday, McGraw Hill Financial agreed to buy SNL Financial LC, the data provider backed by New Mountain Capital LLC, for $2.2 billion. That came on the heels of a $2.35 billion deal launched by WPX Energy Inc. for First Reserve-backed RKI Exploration & Production LLC.

They figured out, in an environment where nearly all assets are overpriced, it’s a great time to sell.

They already waited too long exiting their oil-and-gas investments, which now have started to collapse under the weight of debt and negative cash flows. Instead of struggling to salvage parts of their portfolio companies during restructuring or bankruptcy proceedings, they should have exited in 2013 and early 2014, when exuberance about oil covered up even the depression among natural gas drillers.

But elsewhere, things are still hopping. And it’s high time to get out before the energy debacle and the turmoil at the riskiest end of junk bonds spread more deeply into the PE firms’ portfolios.

And there have been eager buyers: the unsuspecting public via funds that invest in IPOs; and corporations that are buying everything in sight.

Corporations have been buying back their own shares. They’ve been buying privately held companies, including those dumped by PE firms. And they’ve been buying each other in the most awe-inspiring wave of mergers and acquisitions the world has ever seen. The higher the price and the premium, the better. Corporations have become the relentless bid.

And they’re funding this binge with cheaply borrowed money. Junk bonds have seen rough waters recently, with investors getting re-spooked by the energy debacle, and issuance is down so far this year, compared to last year. But high-grade bonds are still booming though the first ripples have appeared.

US corporations issued a total of $802.9 billion in investment-grade bonds this year through July, according to Dealogic, up 27% from the same period in 2014. The most ever.

Of that, $701.7 billion were issued in the US, the highest ever, up 32% from the prior record set during the M&A bubble in 2007 (a now paltry $531.3 billion).

The average deal size jumped 33% from last year to $672 million, also the highest ever.

Yet, even in this rosy scenario, there were problems in July. For seven trading days early in the month, as the turmoil around China and Greece percolated through the markets and as commodities spiraled into a rout, no investment-grade bonds were issued at all. But then the floodgates opened. During the week ended July 17, a “blockbuster $46.9 billion” in investment-grade bonds were issued, according to S&P Capital IQ’s LCD.

In total, $130 billion in investment grade bonds were issued in July, despite the shuttered first week, the highest volume on record for a July, “dwarfing the $47 billion printed” in July 2014 and the $69 billion printed in July 2013. LCD:

July’s blockbuster issuance is owed predominantly to large M&A-driven deals. Earlier on in the month, Charter Communications printed a $15.5 billion bond offering in six parts, as it sought funds to complete its $80 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. This was the largest deal of the month.

During a year fueled by M&A action, the Charter bond issue ranked fourth in size, so far this year, behind Actavis ($21 billion in March), AT&T ($17.5 billion in April), and AbbVie ($16.7 billion in May).

Other mega bond deals hailed down in July: CVS Health placed a $15 billion offering to fund its acquisition of Omnicare and Target’s pharmacy businesses. UnitedHealth sold $10.5 billion in bonds for its purchase of Catamaran. Intel sold $7 billion in bonds for its acquisition of Altera. Etc. etc.

Corporations are buying everything in sight, offering huge premiums on top of the already insane valuations, and they relentlessly bid for their own shares, no matter what the price, and they do all this with cheaply borrowed money, even the smart money is dumping assets at record pace.

PE investments are largely illiquid. Exits take months and sometimes much longer to pull off. PE firms know that the window of opportunity will eventually close, and they can’t wait for the last minute.

Corporations are on the other side. Their angle is financial engineering and oligopoly building; to perfect this game, they’ve become the ultimate dumb money. But it doesn’t matter to their executives; they’re rewarded for financial engineering. And when the party is over, stockholders and bondholders pick up the tab.

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Marketers get online conversion data from every advertising platform they use. This creates a need for a third party platform to help marketers measure online conversion data coming from multiple platforms.

Without the ability to distinguish which prospects converted, and when the conversion happened, marketers can’t see what’s happening in their marketing funnels.

This inability to see what’s really happening, is a situation  captured by the character Gavon Belson in the HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley.

Gavon Belson is the head of Hooli, a fictional tech company in same vein as Yahoo or Microsoft. He hangs out with his spiritual advisor who reaffirms Gavon’s beliefs, supporting all his ideas no matter how shallow or dim-witted.

Gavon’s dev team promises innovation and reports satisfactory progress. Unfortunately, the team ends up creating products that are Windows Vista and Apple Maps bad.

Wondering how this happened, he asks his spiritual guru, “Have I just surrounded myself with sycophants who are just telling me whatever I want to hear, regardless of the truth?”

His spiritual advisor gulps, “Nooo….”

Gavon believes his spiritual advisor and is unable to see the disaster that is happening. Relying on out-of-the-box online conversion data alone leads to the same thing: the inability to see what’s really happening.

How leads progress through the funnel, from first-touch to lead created, simply can’t be known using Adwords conversion click data. Nor can it be done using conversion data from Twitter and Facebook. Using conversion data from these platforms leads to a variety of problems:

• marketers double count leads
• touchpoints are sequenced incorrectly
• attribution models are unreliable

Let’s look at this in more detail.

What Online Conversion Data Can and Can’t Do

First let’s review how Google calculates Adwords converted clicks. A converted click is an AdWords ad click resulting in one or more conversions.

In AdWords you can count the total number of converted clicks, and count the total number of conversions. One converted click can result in multipled conversions if it happens in the same session. For example, they downloade multiple ebooks after clicking on your ad.

You can also report unique conversions. A unique conversion is when a person generates multiple leads, e.g. filling out multiple forms.

AdWords counts the converted click as long as a conversion happens within 30 days after a click is tracked.

There are some important details to remember when using AdWords converted clicks:

• You can’t segment the Converted clicks by conversion name or category, because each ad click can lead to multiple conversions. If you were to segment by conversion name, some converted clicks could be counted more than once, and your segmented converted clicks would add up to more than the total.

• Conversions that happen 30 days after the initial click aren’t tracked.

Next, I’ll illustrate how reporting can become confusing when combining conversion data with ad platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Understanding the Marketing Funnel With Accurate Conversion Data

Let’s say we have three leads who each have a different path through the funnel. They discover your brand (first click), engage (middle touch) and become a lead (last touch). We illustrate each touchpoint for our leads below.

When marketers measure conversions by aggregating data from multiple ad platforms, they end up double counting. And there is no way to know which converted click is the first touch or last touch.

Based on the the same example above, you’ll see how total conversions get miscounted in the chart below.

If marketers can’t see conversion data clearly, they can’t see performance.

Marketers want to know how many leads they generated, when the first and last touch happens, and what channels leads come from — marketers can’t do this if conversion clicks are miscounted and misapplied to leads.

Performance relies on attributing revenue to conversions accurately. In B2B sales cycles, identifying when leads engage, which keywords, ad content, and channels they engage with, provides answers to the big questions in online marketing:

• Where do leads come from?
• Which campaigns are producing revenue?
• Which channels are generating customers?

In Silicon Valley the tech CEO can’t get an accurate picture of his team and their performance, until it’s too late. It plays out accordingly, he attends a focus group and finds that every user has one opinion: the product is a massive flub.

Relying on performance data from vendors is the equivalent of hiring a yes-man to give you honest feedback. Gettting a second opinion via an attribution solution takes the confusion out of measuring performance and online conversions.

How many times have you gotten a drab email from someone “just checking in”? This bland attempt at a hook to get your response will frequently go to your trash in less time than it takes to write the email. Even though they made the attempt to follow-up with you and lead you on a nurture path, they completely failed.

Following up with your contacts is one of the most crucial nurture tactics you can use with your lead campaign. Your emails should prompt the lead to want to send a response. Writing an effective follow-up with your contacts can mean the difference between a lead going cold or developing a solid relationship with the prospect.

Here’s how to write effective follow-up emails to get a response:

1. Think Simple

Even though you should write more than a quick “hey, how’s it going”, a long winded follow-up email is unnecessary. Your email should provide all of the information that your contact seeks, but without excess detail. Get straight to the point and tell them what they need to know. You want to provide information to the contact quickly while you have their attention.

In your follow-up you should always circle back to the contact. You want your messages to come across as worthwhile and valuable. When sending a follow-up email, using excessive subject lines like URGENT, or unattractive bland subject lines will not get you your desired result. Just like the body of your email, your subject line should be specific and descriptive with focus on your message.

Be specific with your questions. The more questions you bombard them with at once the less likely they are to answer all of the questions, and possibly deter a response because the leads are so overwhelmed. If you save some of your questions for later you have even more reason to follow up in the future.

Keep language conversational. Unless the contact necessitates formal language, a relaxed language style will be better received over a flowery and fluffed style of email. It will make you seem more relatable and less pompous.

If you are looking to direct someone to your website, be sure to include a direct CTA that you want them to take action on. Rather than inundating your contact with things to click on and multiple tasks, prioritize what you want them to do in the email.

2. Nurture

A follow-up typically has the end goal of leading to a sale in the future, but using your follow-up as a sales pitch is not useful. Being pushy won’t get you nearly as far as being friendly. You should be aiming to nurture your lead towards a relationship rather than give a continual pitch. Follow-ups aim to develop a relationship before asking for something from your contact.

Grow your relationship by providing value to your contact. Rather than asking what they can do for you, tell them how you can help. Focus on them rather than yourself. People are more responsive to what they can receive rather than what they need to give up.

Before reaching out to your contact, research them to make the follow-up more personal. If they recently published a blog post, added a new skill to LinkedIn, or received a promotion, mention it in your email. This shows you are interested in their life rather than just trying to cajole them for a sale.

Need some help nurturing your contacts? Check out our infographic on nurturing your most important relationships.

3. Back To The Past

Take your contact back mentally to where you first met. If you met at a conference or networking event focus on something specific about the time or place such as did you talk after a speaker, what you were standing near, or who introduced you. These will help to spark their memory.

In your follow-up, talk about something you discussed that was of mutual interest. You can make more of an impact if you send an article related to what you discussed, or start a conversation based on that topic rather than just bringing up your company and doing a sales pitch. You can even invite them to an exciting event and use it as an opportunity to get to know them better.

4. Set An Appointment

It is easy for your contacts to duck out of making a future appointment with you if you are sending a cold follow-up after a span of silence from their end. To avoid the chance of reaching the point where you need to send a cold email to check in, set an appointment while you are in contact with them.

If you are on a phone call, set up another conversation before you hang up. If you don’t get a scheduled date on the phone, then send an email recapping what you discussed and give options for future conversations. If you let them say they will follow-up with you later, then you are likely to never hear from them again.

http://www.yesware.com/blog/sales-follow-up-email/

At the end of your email suggest an appointment time and date. This allows the contact to say yes, no, or let you know a time that works for them. Discuss the next steps you plan on taking and what they should expect in the future.

If someone does not seem to be very responsive to your email follow-ups, flat out ask what is the best way to contact them. Or if there is something that you can put in your subject lines to indicate they should open your emails.

If your contact falls into the unresponsive category, you can try to pull them back in. This is much more difficult than setting up future appointments while you are conversing, but it can be done. You can try sending an email asking them what the plan is for the future, but say you are asking for your boss. People are more likely to respond to you if you are asking for someone other than yourself.

http://www.getsidekick.com/blog/number-one-follow-up-mistake

5. Make It Easy

Remember, you don’t want to focus on yourself. Making the follow up as easy as possible on your contact makes them more likely to respond.

It is highly likely that the contact has forgotten about the last conversation you had. If you are sending an email after a few days, reply to the last email that was sent. This helps your contact by not forcing them to dig through their inbox to find your message, thereby creating more work for them. By clicking reply, even though you are sending a slightly cold contact email, it is easy for your prospect to figure out who you are and what you are referencing.

Always have a reason why you are reaching out to the contact. If you have a specific reason for communicating with them, then they are likely to be more responsive to what you have to say. Personally, if I opened an email that asked me vague general questions, there is a high probability that I will not respond. One reason is that I have to make an effort to figure out what to say. So, to make your contact’s lives easier, send an email with specific talking points or what you expect them to respond with.

Ban The Hollow Follow-Up

Your follow-up should aim to set you apart from the rest by making a connection beyond the usual scope. Adding any personal details or relevant information adds more value to your follow-up. Keeping your follow-up to the point makes life easier on your contact and helps them to focus on what you are saying rather than having to pick through your email to try to understand what is happening. The email should encourage a response by being specific but to the point rather than overwhelming. Making a memorable connection through a follow up leads to a better nurtured client in the future.

Smart sales reps are getting on board with social selling. Researching, engaging with, and reaching out to prospects on social media sites can help salespeople familiarize themselves with their buyers and separate themselves from the crowd. If used correctly, social insights can warm up a cold email or call to the rep’s benefit.

The bad news is that there are plenty of dumb social selling tactics out there. Unfortunately, some reps haven’t gotten the memo on personalizing and customizing their prospecting messages. This is unacceptable through email and on the phone, but a totally cold message is especially egregious on LinkedIn, where a prospect’s information is right there for the reading.

By all means, don’t stop using LinkedIn for sales. Just don’t use it like these folks did. Here are the 10 worst LinkedIn sales ever, or at least the worst I’ve gotten so far this year.

1) Randy Random

Zorian,

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Randy

Why This Message Sucks: I get these plain vanilla LinkedIn invitations a lot, and it’s not a great way to invite people to connect. I don't know Randy and he gives me no compelling reason or context to connect with him.

Randy is a sales rep and I could tell from his job title that he wanted to sell me his services. I respect sales reps and want to be helpful to them. However, this is not a good way to do social selling -- in fact, it’s very “anti-social selling” if you ask me. If you are in sales, please start by building rapport. All it takes is an extra two minutes to research the person and find common ground. The result is a thoughtful LinkedIn invitation that will have a good probability of getting accepted.

2) Gary Grouper

I would like to invite you to join my group on LinkedIn.

- Gary

Why This Message Sucks: Mr. Grouper is trying to get me to join his LinkedIn group. First of all, I have no idea what the group is -- he doesn’t mention that in his message. All I know is that Gary would like me to join it. Hmm.

I would urge sales professionals to minimize the focus on themselves and stay away from language like “I would like to” even if it’s in a template in LinkedIn. Your messaging should be all about the prospect. I wish Gary told me more about the group -- perhaps it’s really great and I’m missing out. But I guess I’ll never know as I deleted the message almost immediately.

3) Curt Commonality

Zorian, We are members of the same LinkedIn group and I want to contact you as we sell services that you will appreciate knowing about.

Why This Message Sucks: This is a variation on the previous example, and messages like these just aren't effective. I get a lot of emails that start with “We are members of the same LinkedIn group.” I don’t think this opening works. After all, just because someone is a member of a LinkedIn group (which they probably rarely participate in) doesn’t mean you have a lot in common. A LinkedIn group is not a sports team or an alma matter. This opening makes you look like an amateur.

Furthermore -- and this is a recurring theme -- I typically tell my sales teams not to use expressions such as “I want,” because it's not about what you want. It's about what your prospect wants. Saying "I want" puts emphasis on you rather than on your prospect. 

4) Kenny Klueless

Hi Zorian, I thought that Acme Corp. might be interested in participating in an event that my company is organizing -- the 2015 Cyber Security Exchange which will be held in Florida December 6-8 2015.

I am working with 50 CIOs from Fortune 1000 companies who have expressed a desire to meet solution providers who can help them...

- Kenny

Why This Message Sucks: Kenny really needs to brush up on his sales skills. Here are just a few of the reasons this message flopped:

1. I haven't worked at Acme Corp in about a year. A brief once over on my LinkedIn profile would have brought that to Kenny’s attention. If you fail to prepare, then you prepare to fail.
2. Not to mention that Acme Corp doesn’t even sell to CIOs -- that’s not their target customer.
3. Oh, and they don't focus on Fortune 1000 but instead on SMBs.
4. Finally, they don’t even sell a security product so this security conference is not a fit in the slightest.

Do your research, Kenny. Please!

5) Tracy Trickster

Subject: Hey there, it's been a while.

Hey I was just reaching out to see how you're doing. I'm wondering if we could get together to talk about X, Y, and Z. Please reach out to me if this proposition sounds interesting to you.

- Tracy

Why This Message Sucks: This person is making it sound as if we know each other. But I've never met Ms. Trickster. The subject line got me to click because I was wondering if Tracy was someone I knew … but then I realized I didn’t. Don’t pretend you’re someone’s old buddy if you’re not. Not only does this trick rarely get a response, it makes people mad.

6) Thor Throwup

Greetings,

We want to do business together. We are a software development company since 2005 and provide software outsourcing services to our clients all around the globe. Services include [long list of buzzwords].

Best Regards,

Thor

Why This Message Sucks: Greetings to you too, Thor. That opening reminds me of an alien movie. But all jokes aside, it’s good to know that Thor "wants to do business together" … although if he hopes to sell then he should be focused on what his prospects want.

Alas, he doesn't ask for my needs and instead just “shows up and throws up.” He throws a bunch of tech buzzwords at me hoping something will stick and attract my attention. That's not sales -- that’s spam.

7) Harry Heymaker

Hey....

Why This Message Sucks: Hey! I deleted the rest of the email to make an important point. Stay away from hey-ing someone you don’t know. If you’re in sales, it pays to be professional in emails to prospects. Save “hey” for friends (and horses).

8) Laura Lunchtime

Zorian, I would love to grab lunch and hear more about your company. Let's help each other grow our businesses.

- Laura

Why This Message Sucks: Laura is being nice and trying to do her job -- I respect and appreciate the effort. But she doesn't know me and is trying to leap past a couple of sales stages without first building rapport.

You can’t rush sales. Everything has to be done at the right stage of the sales process. I also don't have much time for lunches with folks I don’t know or who are not my customers or investors. Any sales rep should know that inviting busy people for lunch without building rapport first doesn’t work.

9) Caroline Copypaste

Any chance you're available for a few hours on Tuesday, June 30th? Well-known storage expert Joe Harddrive is speaking at our Super Special Storage Summit that every IT Manager will enjoy and appreciate. Feel free to message me with any questions regarding the seminar. We look forward to seeing you at the event! For more information about the event, please visit: www.blahblah.com

Why This Message Sucks: Caroline is rushing to quickly copy/paste messages without even adding people’s names (yes, my name is missing in the greeting). This is a bad tactic called “spray and pray.” If she didn't even bother to type my name then I am just a number in a big list of names for her and this is obvious to the prospect who receives such emails.

Also, Caroline clearly didn't research me because I don't have anything to do with storage, I am not an IT professional, and in fact, I work in an entirely different industry altogether. Why even send this message to me? Why not take an extra step and go through the names on your list to only write to the correct people with direct messages that make sense? I’m willing to bet Caroline would generate more quality leads, and look a lot more professional in the process.

10) Larry Linkediner

Hey Zorian,

Our CEO, Wes Webinar, is teaming up with fellow CEO, Timmy Talker, to share ideas for doing super training in a webinar on Thursday, July 30. Better training has helped our clients shorten sales cycles by 88% and boost their close rates by 55%. Would love to have you join.

Register here: http://bit.ly/ abc123

Thanks,

Larry

Why This Message Sucks: Again, this is an obvious “spray and pray” approach. Larry starts with “Hey” which turns me off right away (see above). Then he pitches a webinar without understanding if the content would be interesting to me or not. It doesn’t tie into anything I’ve written about my experience or interests on LinkedIn. So this just won’t work. Sorry Larry.

Conclusion

I hope you don’t think I’m jaded. As a former salesperson and sales leader, I love sales reps and I want to see them succeed.

But just as important as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Internalize the takeaways from these failed messages to be a social selling success.

Sales forecasting is an important activity for every sales force. Yet, few organizations are happy with the accuracy of their forecasts. Despite spending a lot of time and effort on the task, revenue predictions frequently, well, suck. And no amount of pressure from senior leadership seems to improve the issue.

So, what causes all these terrible forecasts? And, more importantly, what can you do to improve forecasting outcomes? Vantage Point has conducted research into forecasting and discovered two fundamental issues.

You’re Using the Wrong Forecasting Framework

Many sales organizations use a forecasting framework that doesn’t reflect the way their salespeople sell. Our research shows 85% of B2B companies use a forecasting approach based on a pipeline of opportunities that are given an estimated deal size, slotted into a stage of the company’s sales process, assigned a likelihood of being won, and forecasted at a future close date.

Setting aside the many problems with how this opportunity forecasting method is executed, let’s focus on a more fundamental issue that cripples many sales forecasts: it’s possible you should be using a forecasting framework other than this classic pipeline forecasting approach.

Our study of 62 global sales organizations discovered 74% believe their forecasts should be based on something other than a pipeline of opportunities; however, only 34% of those same companies use alternative approaches.

If your forecasts are based on a model that isn’t relevant for your sales force, it’s easy to see why your forecasts suck. You’re developing forecasts using data and assumptions that don’t reflect what’s actually happening in the field.

It would be like trying to read this article while moving your eyes from right to left rather than left to right. Similarly, many companies try to shoehorn their forecasts into an opportunity-based model with stages and percentages when it just doesn’t make sense to do so. Unsurprisingly, these forecasts don’t make sense either.

Alternate ways to conduct a revenue forecast

There are at least two other methods of sales forecasting proven to return better results:

• Account level forecasting: Use this if you have a business model where a high number of deals flow from a handful of existing customers.
• Territory level forecasting: Use this if your salespeople cover geographies with dozens or even hundreds of accounts.

So, if you’re using a traditional, opportunity-based forecasting model and suffer from erratic forecasts, consider whether you should be using a different method to develop your forecasts -- one that more closely reflects the selling motion of your sales team. Otherwise, you’ll continue to invest large chunks of time in an activity that will never yield better results. And that sucks worse than the actual forecasts.

You’re Making Random Assumptions

A second issue crippling sales forecasts is random assumptions. Regardless of your forecasting methodology, you need to do some math based on a set of assumptions -- and what those assumptions are matters.

For example, if you base your forecast on a pipeline of opportunities, you must assume a deal size, likelihood of winning, and close date. If these assumptions are way off, your forecast will be as well.

The surprising thing here is sales organizations have plenty of historical data to inform the most likely deal size, win rate, and sales cycle length for a particular type of opportunity. Yet, salespeople are allowed to plug in their best guesses -- as viewed through their optimistic eyes.

I once knew a salesperson who always claimed his outstanding proposals were 75% likely to close. When I asked whether he actually won 75% of his proposals, he responded, “No, probably more like 30%.” Oh, how’s that forecast looking? Let me guess.

If you have historical data to help eliminate the randomness of the assumptions feeding your forecast, use it -- especially if you have a high volume of deals in your forecast.

The law of large numbers dictates the variations in individual deals will average themselves out to the most likely outcome. Sure, that $100,000 proposal might be 75% likely to close on December 31st -- but, probably not.

Tighten up that forecast

There are many factors that influence the accuracy of a sales forecast. If you’re basing yours on the wrong methodology and you’re populating that with faulty assumptions, you’re off to a bad start.

Adding a little rigor to your forecasts will go a long way in improving their value as a communication and planning tool. Everybody wants more accurate forecasts, and everybody spends a lot of time doing it. Some just do it better than others -- by design.

Salespeople are well acquainted with the power of LinkedIn for prospect research, trigger event tracking, and customer engagement. But what about generating new sales leads (read: a lot of them)?

If your pipeline is looking a bit empty, peruse the following SlideShare from LinkedSelling. You'll discover how to whip up a long list of hot sales leads ripe for the contacting. 

If you're like most salespeople, you're on LinkedIn all day for work anyway. Now learn how to make it work for you. 

P.S. Looking for even more LinkedIn sales tips? If you're not too busy researching and calling your wealth of new prospects, you might want to check out our guide to hidden LinkedIn hacks.

Cracking LinkedIn from LinkedSelling